Last Chance to See

remember the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar? They’ve got scent glands in their wrists. They rub their tails between their wrists and then wave their tails in the air to spread the scent around, just to occupy the territory. That’s why dogs pee against lampposts as well. You’re just scent-marking your way around China. Old habits die hard.”
    “Does anyone happen to know,” asked Chris, who had been lolling sleepily against the window for an hour or so, “what the Chinese for Nanjing actually
looks
like? I only ask so as we’ll know when we’ve got there.”
    In Nanjing we had our first sight of the river. Although Shanghai is known as the gateway to the Yangtze, it isn’t actually on it, but is on a connecting river called the Huangpu. Nanjing is on the Yangtze itself.
    It is a grim town, or at least we found it to be so. The sense of alien dislocation gathered us more tightly into its grip. We found the people to be utterly opaque; they would either stare at us or ignore us. I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a Frenchman on the plane to Beijing.
    “It is difficult to talk to the Chinese people,” he had said. “Partly it is the language, if you do not speak Chinese, but also, you know, they have been through many, many things. So they think it is safer perhaps to ignore you. If they talk to you or do not talk to you, they are paid the same whatever, so,
pfffft
. I think if they get to know you, they talk a little more, perhaps, but
pfffft
.”
    The sense of dislocation was sharpened by the presence, in the centre of town, of a single major Western-style high-risehotel, called the Jing Ling. It was an anonymously grand conference-holding, revolving-bar-and-atrium-ridden modern hotel of the sort that generally I heartily dislike, but suddenly it was like an oasis to us.
    We made straight for the revolving top-floor bar like rats from a sack and sat huddled for safety around a cluster of gin and tonics. After twenty minutes or so of sitting in these unexpectedly familiar surroundings, we found, as we gazed out of the panoramic windows at the vast, alien, darkened city which turned slowly around us, that we felt like astronauts in a vast, warm life-support system, looking out over the hostile and barren terrain of another planet.
    We were all seized with a sudden desire not to have to go out there anymore, not to have to be stared at, ignored, spat at, or have our personal space invaded by bicycles. Unfortunately, the Jing Ling had no available rooms, and we were ejected into the night to find lodging in an altogether grimmer crumbling hotel on the outskirts, where we sat and thought, once more, about the dolphins out in their filthy river and how we were to make our recording.
    On a day darkened with drizzle, we stood on the bank of the Yangtze, watching the great drifting sea of sludge which flows sullenly from the depths of China. The only colour in a heavy landscape of dark brown shading to grey, against which long, black, smoke-belching silhouettes of dieselengined junks thudded and growled up the river, was a little pink knotted condom dangling limply on the end of a cable attached to Chris’s tape recorder. The half-heard swish of unseen multitudes of bicycles was like the distant drumming of hooves. From here the bewilderment of Shanghai seemed like a remote warm memory of home.
    The river was not deep enough at the bank for our sound experiment, and we slogged our way through the accumulating rain toward the docks in search of deeper water. We shook our heads at the occasional importunate cries frompassing bicycle-driven rickshaws, being too sunk in gloom to admit even the possibility of relief.
    We found a temporarily deserted passenger ferry lolling against the creaking dock and trudged up the gangplank. The ferries are big, hulking, five-decker wedges, which look like immense, soiled slices of lemon gâteau grinding daily up and down the Yangtze, each carrying upwards of a thousand cramped passengers and playing Richard Clayderman at them. We found our way through a series of bulkhead doors to a deck that overlooked the river, where Chris tried hopelessly to dangle the little pink thing with its button microphone down into the murky waters. It would scarcely reach, was blown about by the wind, and when at last it dropped down to the water, it sat perkily on top of it.
    There was another deck below us, but it proved difficult to find—the innards of the boat continually