Lost in Translation Page 0,41

slept. By the time she opened her eyes on her hard pallet the next morning the hills had flattened out; all the green land had vanished and they were rattling across the yellow rock-strewn desert. It seemed to stretch to the limit of the earth. Nothing but boulders and steppes forming low, tired plateaus tufted with struggling gray-green grass.

"Teilhard took this train," she said.

"That’s right. In 1923, on his way to find Shuidonggou, his first big site. Shuidonggou’s in the Ordos Desert—that’s where we’re going to start."

"Because you’re thinking, he hid this crate of fossils out there in 1945. How? He shipped it to someone?"

"Or he carried it there himself. There is this one month, April of forty-five, when he’s unaccounted for. He wasn’t in Peking, but there’s no record of where he went."

"How could he have traveled out here during the war?"

Spencer lifted his hands. "I don’t know. Maybe he just found a way. But I know one thing, from his letters. He loved it out here. Shuidonggou was a place that gave him hope."

Her eyes locked in. "You know—I think you’re right. I remember a line I read last night in one of the books. He wrote from somewhere—Ethiopia, I think—that he felt homesick for Mongolia. For Mongolia! I thought it was odd."

"But if you think about what happened to him out here it makes sense. He stumbled on a site of ancient man. The locals dropped everything they were doing and pitched in to help him. It was the proof he was looking for."

"Though it didn’t help—with Rome, I mean."

"No. It didn’t."

They settled back, Spencer making notes, Alice watching the morning bustle that had taken over their crowded railroad car. It was overflowing now with bodies and luggage and had become a noisy, hurtling village—a Mandarin wall of shouting, laughing, and singing. Old men coughed and hacked and spat at the floor, none too accurately. Spencer winced at the sounds, but Alice was used to it. And she knew, when she got up, to step carefully over the splintered sunflower-seed shells, gnawed watermelon rinds, and sodden black tea leaves.

By noon the pebbly sea outside had given way to grass-lands. Baotou was scheduled for twelve-fifteen.

Now on the horizon Alice could make out the huddle of sand-colored buildings.

"Our colleagues." Spencer closed his notebook.

"Yes." She peered ahead, trying to make sense of the far-off skyline. The two men from Zhengzhou would be there, just ahead, in that town, waiting on the platform. Right now. That tall, contained man, Dr. Lin. And Dr. Kong.

They shot into the squat, sun-baked town, clanked into the station, squealed to a stop.

All around the train was a hissing cloud, the surge of people, shouts and cries, and suddenly there they were, Dr. Kong and Dr. Lin. They bumped their big suitcases down the aisle, smiling. "Hello again," they said. "Hello."

"Hello."

"Hi."

Alice and Spencer stood up. Alice spoke. "Was your journey pleasant?"

"You trouble yourself too much to inquire," Dr. Lin said, using the kind of honorific Chinese one didn’t hear so often these days, except on Taiwan. Mainland people were more suibian, follow convenience, casual. Not him.

"It is of your journey that one should speak," he continued. "You are the foreign guests." He ran his hand through his shock of black hair, then turned and settled his suitcase up into the storage net above the window.

Her gaze settled on his back.

He seemed to feel it, glanced behind. "Truly spoken, it’s an amazing thing. You can really talk."

"Your praise is unjustified," she answered. It was a proper answer, but she tempered it with a smile. She knew her Chinese was good. Mainly, of course, it was because she had a good ear. She had always loved music. All her life, even when she was small, she’d been aware that she heard music the way most other people did not—really heard it. And when she got older and studied Chinese, she found that the other students didn’t listen the way that she did. They thought they did, but they didn’t. And because she heard Chinese, the way that she had always heard music, she quickly picked up the small lilts and angles of Mandarin speech. So what was exceptional about her Chinese was her accent, not her vocabulary. It took years of hard work to build a Chinese vocabulary, and hard work was not Alice’s strong point. Smart but ever so slightly lazy, that was Alice. To Dr. Lin now she demurred politely: "There are lots of foreigners around