Lost in Translation Page 0,52

was working.

Spencer held out the bead.

"Let me see," said Kong, reaching for it, and somehow in the fumble the thing dropped to their feet, glanced off someone’s shoe, and bounced out of the cutaway toward the valley floor below.

Alice saw Lin’s face, stricken, follow the tiny, threading arc the bead made for a split second against the air. White, almost the same color as the earth below, it would be hell to find.

"Oh, shit," Adam mumbled. "Sorry."

"The fault is mine." Kong sighed.

"No, really. God."

"It doesn’t matter," Kong said. He turned to the wall and returned to prizing out chips and rock bits. "There is more here to find."

"No"—Lin shook his head—"it was perfect. I’m going to look for it." He turned and climbed back down the handholds in the wall.

Adam sighed. "I feel terrible."

"It’s okay," she said, knowing it wasn’t, not really.

"Listen, Alice. Let’s start looking for the Mongol family. They’re the thing we should concentrate on."

She closed her eyes and visualized the empty rock-and-earth expanse of this little valley the way they had seen it, driving in. There had been no signs of habitation. None. "Did you see anything from the jeep?"

"No, I didn’t. But let’s just start walking."

She explained to Dr. Kong, and they followed Lin back down the wall. Kong was absorbed in the microliths embedded in the loess walls, Lin in pacing back and forth by the stream, head down, scanning the soft earth. Alice and Adam left them and hiked upstream.

"Teilhard never says exactly where they lived."

"What if they’re gone?" she asked.

"They might be."

"What if even their house is gone?"

"That’s unlikely. The climate here preserves things, which is why Teilhard found so much at Shuidonggou in the first place. We’ll find them. We just have to cover the whole area."

So they walked, in the pulsating yellow sun, through the silty dirt. The crumbling canyon walls rose around them. Ravines and washes tumbled down from the crest above, where the ridgeline was still topped with the eroded backbone of the Great Wall.

Spencer said they should explore each ravine in turn. So they climbed as high in each one as they could, struggling up the grade, slipping in the quick, fine earth. Sometimes they got close enough to catch a glimpse of the worn-down Wall above them, sometimes they hit a jumble of rocks or an impossibly narrow cleft or some other formation that told them no house could possibly have been built any higher up. Then they would turn around. They stopped talking. There was no sound except their sand-sucking footsteps, the drone of wind, and the scratching of Adam’s pen in his notebook as he mapped the system of canyons.

"Keep going," Spencer insisted when her disappointment started to show. She did. Even three hours later, when his shirt was sweat blotched and his nose starting to show pink, he kept saying it. "Let’s do the next one."

"The house could be anywhere. In any direction."

"We’ll find it," he said stubbornly.

It was like this, dragging, empty handed, that Dr. Lin Shiyang spotted them moving around the lip of a wash, at the turn of the canyon a mile or so up. "Tamen zai ner," he said with relief, and pointed them out to Kong with his chin. A small movement, economical. He was hot and tired too.

’’Na hao. Women zou-ba. " Kong sighed, and walked away to collect the driver from his patch of shade.

When the Americans walked up Lin could see they’d found nothing. Their eyes sagged with failure.

"It should have been right here," Spencer said, the rust-headed woman putting his words into melodious Chinese. "Right by the site. But it’s okay. Tomorrow, we’ll keep looking."

He nodded and looked down at the woman. "Zenmoyang?" he asked her—How did it go?

She shook her head. Nothing.

"Tai zao-le, " he said sympathetically.

Alice sighed in acknowledgment. All she wanted at this moment was to get back to Yinchuan and have a bath. She was coated with dust and grit. Her mouth was dry and aching with thirst, but she had finished off her water bottle as they hiked back down the last canyon.

Lin saw her glance at her bottle, empty, saw the flush in her freckled cheeks. He held out his own, still a third full. "Gei, " he said quietly.

"Oh, no," she said. "Na zenmo xing."

"Gei, " he said again.

She took it, drank gratefully, and handed it back to him. "Thank you."

He nodded and reattached it to his belt.

"What did you get?" Spencer was saying in English to Dr.