Lost in Translation Page 0,43
what we want, the intact teeth, the DNA sample, to find out who modern humans are descended from. So ask him. Ask him if he believes Homo erectus came from Africa or evolved in China."
"Dr. Lin. Dr. Spencer wonders if you think Peking Man evolved separately here in China, or if Homo erectus evolved everywhere out of Africa."
Lin opened his small black eyes wide. "Separately in China. Naturally. This is well known."
She conveyed this to Spencer.
"What?" the American pressed. "How is it known?"
Lin lifted his big shoulders in a shrug. "It is borne out by the fossils—Acheulean tools are found with Homo erectus in Africa and Europe, but never in China. Asian Homo erectus must be a separate species. Of course, this is logical. China is the seat of civilization. It’s the place where all ancient life took hold. Also, it hardly seems possible that modern Chinese could be descended from Africans. The races are too—too different."
Dr. Spencer opened his mouth, then closed it again. He gave Alice a look that said: Aren’t they silly. She could tell Dr. Lin, eyes crinkling with humor as he leafed through the book of Teilhard’s letters, was thinking the same thing about them.
Late that night, just before she slipped into the deep, disassociated well of sleep, a shaft of light crossed the car and she caught a glimpse of Dr. Lin’s face in the opposite berth. His eyes were open and he was watching her.
The lush oasis fringe around Yinchuan appeared as a sudden block of emerald, backed right up to the rocky brown desert. One moment there were mountains bare as flesh undulating to the horizon, the next the train was flashing through grove after grove of oleaster trees, their leaves rustling green and silver in the wind. Canal trenches jumped out of the Yellow River, itself a muddy silt ribbon in the distance, and sprinted in all directions. They vanished into fields of eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. And miles of rice: the seductive carpet of deep green so rarely seen in north China.
In 1923, she knew, the rail line had ended at Baotou— where Lin and Kong had boarded the train. There Teilhard and his fellow priest, Émile Licent, had paid silver Mex dollars for mules, and ridden across the desert to this city, Yinchuan. The name Yinchuan was incomprehensible to Alice. Yinchuan meant Silver River, and nowhere was the river anything but a slow, plodding brown. She noticed as the train clattered through town that the city walls Teilhard had mentioned in his letters were gone. Instead there was a string of masonry buildings, and the billowing smokestacks of factories. Here and there Alice could see a few of the original gates and watchtowers, still standing up, shocked and ancient.
They fell exhausted into the lobby of the Number One Guesthouse, spilling on the limestone floor with their bags and their gear and their dust-streaked clothes. They were given their rooms: Alice and Adam in one building, Kong and Lin in another.
"Why?" Adam wanted to know.
It was the way it always was, she explained: Chinese and foreigners separated.
She shut herself in her room and immediately and obsessively unpacked, the way she always did upon arrival in a new hotel room. Her clothes formed neat rows in the wooden drawer, the antique silk stomach-protector and black dress hidden at the bottom. She dug from her pocket the small folded drawing of the monkey sun head and the obituary of Lucile Swan, and placed them on the bureau. Then she drew the heavy Pompeiian-red velvet curtains, filled the bathtub, stripped, and climbed in.
Ah, she thought. Light from the overhead bulb broke up on the water’s surface, clinking and distorting the pale line of her naked body underneath. She soaked until she felt clean, delivered, all true and restored again. For a time.
She closed her eyes.
She must have dozed, because when she jolted back the water had grown cold and still. She splashed to her feet, shook the drops from her hair, rubbed hard at herself with the towel.
Awake again, alive.
Tea.
Suddenly she wanted to get out, walk, see Yinchuan. Was it really different from the China she knew? So far it seemed like any backwater town, and this hotel—with its barely functional toilets and old-fashioned velvet curtains—was just another provincial establishment.
Dressed, she stepped into the hall. She saw that Spencer’s door was closed. He’d said something about reviewing Teilhard’s maps from the 1923 Shuidonggou expedition. She listened at the door, heard nothing, and went