Lost in Translation Page 0,50

The terrain was so like the Mojave that Alice expected to see a green-and-white sign at any moment, announcing Barstow or Needles. But the road was unadorned and the desert was empty under the brilliant azure sky. Alice held on hard to the window frame as they slammed over potholes and rattled in and out of ruts.

"Dr. Kong." Spencer leaned over the seat. "Is it true as I’ve heard—the archaeological sites out here are undisturbed?"

"Oh, yes! Untouched." Kong smiled, though his bony frame was bouncing cruelly against the hard seat. "Man has been here continuously for eons. We just have not had the resources to study the place. Only a few of the major cultures have even been identified!"

"God," Adam groaned next to her. "Alice, there’s nothing like this in the West. It’s a gold mine."

"Want to change your project?" she joked.

"No! Peking Man’s the thing. That’s what we’re after."

"But it’s heaven for Dr. Kong," she said, glancing at the rapt Chinese professor.

Lin was watching her. "Dr. Kong loves the Neolithic," he said.

"And you, Dr. Lin? You love Homo erectus?"

"I do," he said, and excitement touched his mouth and eyes. "I’ve studied Sinanthropus all my life—from pictures, you understand, and from the bits and pieces we have found at other sites around China. It’s not much. A skull fragment here and a tooth there. Of course, we keep digging at Zhoukoudian, but during the fifty years since Peking Man disappeared we have found almost nothing. Nothing like the original cache of fossils."

"Yet you’ve learned a lot about the yuanren."

"Yes—his tools, what he ate, how he hunted, how he used fire. Where he found shelter."

"Did they have language? Imagination?"

He laughed out loud. "Of course, we don’t know this. But, truly spoken, we could learn so much more if we could locate Peking Man. That is why I had to come on this expedition. If there is any chance at all to find it—even so little as one blade in a field of grass—it is worth going to the ends of the world."

Ah, she thought, such longing. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we succeeded?"

"Ke bu shi ma, " he said in the soft voice of a man who has learned not to allow himself to hope, Isn’t it so.

Presently the jeep left the road and bounced through a grove of oleaster trees. The trees stopped at a barren, skidding slope of bare dirt. At its bottom, slow and brown with the sun shattered all over it, crawled the Yellow River.

The jeep coughed to a stop in the trees. Red-cheeked children ran shrieking up the bank, and a gaggle of older women appeared with a watermelon, a cleaver, and a piece of bright cloth. In a moment they had rigged up a little table and awning and were selling slices for thirty fen apiece. Other passengers rolled down into the grove to wait with them: a truckful of armed People’s Liberation Army soldiers, a man driving goats, and a stunted little pickup truck overflowing with a family of Mongols. Alice stared at the ancient patriarch, tiny round glasses of hammered gold on his nose and a few wisps of white straggling from his chin.

"Good morning, Elder uncle," she said politely.

"The foreigner talks! The foreigner talks!" The children punched each other and giggled. The old man’s eyes were almost lost in folds of skin; his papery mouth trembled.

Then she studied the soldiers, wood faced, sitting in two rows in their flatbed truck. Each gripped the worn stock of an automatic rifle.

"What are soldiers doing out here?" Spencer whispered.

She swallowed. "Remember what they’ve been saying. This is a military area."

"So’s Nevada," he said sourly.

He was right, of course. She noticed the other passengers had edged away from the soldiers and turned their backs to them. An unpleasant silence ballooned over the group, broken only by the slight slapping of the waves and the hum of the barge’s little motor as it bellied up to the shore and loaded everyone on.

They crossed the river in silence and drove off the barge on the other side. "The PLA’s not too popular out here, is it?" Spencer asked. She translated softly. Kong and Lin looked at each other but didn’t answer.

The road was now dirt, rutted and unpaved, and they drove west on it through landscape which had subtly changed. Instead of rocky, pebbly desert there stretched away all around them a carpet of yellow earth—loess, Spencer called it, the dust and silt carried and spread by the