Yellow River over geologic time. This blanket of loess was not flat, but billowed and rolled in every direction, making hills and hollows and soft eroded canyons, all the same dun color. Loess. Left by the river. Carved out of this earth, every so often, were little settlements of houses, with sunflowers and hollyhocks blooming by their doors. But as they drove through these settlements the people Alice glimpsed didn’t look as she expected. They had neither the flat, scornful faces of the Mongols nor the mixed, half-Turkic faces of the Muslims. They weren’t tall the way northern Chinese were either. The people she saw were small, with wiry, curved legs and compact, corded bodies. They looked like the people in China’s southern provinces. Puzzling.
"Have these villages been here long?" Alice asked Dr. Kong as they rattled through one.
"Not long," he answered.
"Like... a few generations?" she pushed.
He shifted in his seat, adjusting his cell phone on his belt, looking away. "The people you see out here were resettled. East China and South China are very crowded. Here, the population is small. So people moved here."
She heard the careful diction of Chinese evasion and glanced imprudently at Lin. He darkened his eyes in the universal signal: Don’t ask about this. She turned, mind racing, and fixed an innocent look out the window. So! These villagers must have been inmates of the laogai, released from the camps but not allowed to leave the area. Of course. She could see they were poor people with hardscrabble lives, hanging washing over rocks and pulling carts down dirt tracks. They had all been prisoners, and now were doomed to a lifetime in this yellow dust. Was Lin’s wife one?
It was almost noon when they finally topped a rise and headed down a long slope to the Shuidonggou site. At the bottom of the little dirt valley lay a winding, glittering creek lined with rustling acacia trees. Behind the creek rose a canyon wall, and along the top of the canyon limped what was left of the Great Wall.
In the center of the canyon face, halfway up, a huge box-like hole had been excavated.
"This is it," Kong whispered. He jumped out of the jeep and scrambled eagerly up the yellow-earth wall.
They all followed. "This is one of the few archaeological sites in China that’s really been excavated," Adam told Alice. "Like Zhoukoudian."
Lin pried a tiny piece of stone out of the dirt wall. "See? This type of rock is native to this area. It could have occurred here naturally. But this one"—he worked another one loose— "had to have been brought here by someone. That’s how we can tell humans lived here. And look." He brushed off the bits of dirt. "See these scrape marks and chips? It was worked by someone’s hands."
"Incredible," Alice breathed. "What kind of culture lived here?"
"This is a Late Paleolithic site," Dr. Lin said. "So, of course, I do not know as much as Dr. Kong." He glanced at the other Chinese professor, on his knees, excitedly picking bits of rock from the dirt wall. "But I know a little. We should find microliths everywhere. You see, stonework was quite advanced here, and they trimmed pieces like this into scrapers and blades. Hunting was crucial—until about eight thousand years ago, when they started domesticating steppe animals and growing crops. Then their tool making changed." He smiled down at her. "Do you find it interesting?"
"Interesting!" She examined the stone he had handed her. "It’s almost beyond words. How old do you think this is?"
He peered at it. "Maybe ten, twelve thousand years."
"I’ve never held anything so old," she breathed.
"Look!" Spencer cried suddenly.
He had picked up a tiny circle of something white, and laid it on his palm; it had a perfect hole drilled through its middle. A bead. "See?" Spencer said. "Only a human with a tool could have made this. It’s ostrich shell. That makes it easy to date—ostriches have been extinct here since the end of the Pleistocene. Beautiful, isn’t it?"
Alice translated, skipping over the words ostrich and Pleistocene,and saying instead, "a big bird that has been extinct here for a long time." She stared awestruck at the tiny thing. Someone made that at least ten thousand years ago, she thought. Ten thousand years — the time unit of commitment in the Chinese mind. I will love you for ten thousand years. May you live for ten thousand years. Wansui.
"What?" said Dr. Kong, looking up from the spot where he