Last Chance to See

has become much muddier during the history of the baiji species, mostly because of human activity.)
    As a consequence, the baiji had to use a different sense to find its way around. It relies on sound. It has incredibly acute hearing, and “sees” by echolocation, emitting sequences of tiny clicks and listening for the echoes. It also communicates with other baijis by making whistling noises.
    Since man invented the engine, the baiji’s river world must have become a complete nightmare.
    China has a pretty poor road system. It has railways, but they don’t go everywhere, so the Yangtze (which in China is called the Chang Jiang, or “Long River”) is the country’s main highway. It’s crammed with boats all the time, andalways has been—but they used to be sailing boats. Now the river is constantly churned up by the engines of rusty old tramp steamers, container ships, giant ferries, passenger liners, and barges.
    I said to Mark, “It must be continuous bedlam under the water.”
    “What?”
    “I said it’s hard enough for us to talk in here with this band going on, but it must be continuous bedlam under the water.”
    “Is that what you’ve been sitting here thinking all this time?”
    “Yes.”
    “I thought you’d been quiet.”
    “I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.”
    “Well, it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” Mark said. “Dolphins rely on sound to see with.”
    “All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.”
    “Why?”
    “All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you’d become completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.”
    “Well, that’s exactly what’s happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen’s nets. A dolphin’s echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can’t tell that it’s about to be brained by a boat
    “Then, of course, there’s all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that’s being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.”
    “So,” I said, “what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head, and the food is bad?”
    “I think I’d complain to the management.”
    “They can’t.”
    “No. They have to wait for the management to notice.”
    A little later I suggested that, as representatives of the management so to speak, perhaps we ought to try to hear what the Yangtze actually sounded like under the surface—to record it in fact. Unfortunately, since we’d only just thought of it, we didn’t have an underwater microphone with us.
    “Well, there’s one thing we can do,” said Chris. “There’s a standard technique in the BBC for waterproofing a microphone in an emergency. What you do is you get the microphone and you stuff it inside a condom. Either of you got any condoms with you?”
    “Er, no.”
    “Nothing lurking in your sponge bags?”
    “No.”
    “Well, we’d better go shopping, then.”
    By now I was beginning to think in sound pictures. There are two very distinctive sounds in China, three if you count Richard Clayderman.
    The first is spitting. Everybody spits. Wherever you are you continually hear the sound: the long-drawn-out, sucking, hawking noise of mucus being gathered up into the mouth, followed by the hissing launch of the stuff through the air, and, if you’re lucky, the ping of it hitting a spittoon, of which there are many. Every room has at least one. In one hotel lobby I counted a dozen strategically placed in corners and alcoves. In the streets of Shanghai there is a plastic spittoon sunk into the pavement on every street corner, filled with cigarette butts, litter, and thick, curling, bubbly mucus. Youwill also see many signs saying NO SPITTING , but since these are in English rather than Chinese, I suspect that they are of cosmetic value only. I was told that spitting in the street was actually an offence now, with a fine attached to it. If it were ever enforced, I think that the entire economy of China would tilt on