Last Chance to See

deflected us with bolted doors. At last we solved the maze of it and emerged once again overlooking the river, several feet lower.
    The microphone still would not sink into the thick brown water until we weighted it down with my hotel room key from Beijing, which I discovered inadvertently about my person. The microphone, wrapped in its condom, settled into the depths and Chris started to record.
    Boat after boat crawled thunderously past us up the river. They were mostly twenty- or thirty-foot soot-black junks, whose small crews regarded us sometimes with perplexed curiosity and sometimes not at all. At the back of each junk an aged diesel engine juddered and bellowed as it poured black clouds into the air and drove the screw beneath the water.
    After we had been on the deck a few minutes, a member of the ferry’s crew suddenly arrived and expressed surprise at seeing us there. We did not, of course, speak Mandarin, but the question “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” has a familiar ring in any language.
    The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselvesdefeated us. We settled instead for explaining, by means of elaborate mime and sign language, that we were barking mad. This worked. He accepted it, but then hung around in the background to watch us anyway. At last Chris hauled the apparatus up out of the water, dried it off, and showed it to him. As soon as the crewman recognised that it was a condom we had been dangling in the water, it seemed as if some light dawned.
    “Ah!” he said. “Ficky Ficky!” He grinned happily and plunged his forefinger in and out of his other fist. “Ficky ficky!”
    “Yes,” we agreed. “Ficky ficky.”
    Pleased that all was clear now, he wandered off and left us to it as, each in turn, we listened to the tape over headphones.
    The sound we heard wasn’t exactly what I had expected. Water is a very good medium for the propagation of sound and I had expected to hear clearly the heavy, pounding reverberations of each of the boats that had gone thundering by us as we stood on the deck. But water transmits sound even better than that, and what we were hearing was everything that was happening in the Yangtze for many, many miles around, jumbled cacophonously together.
    Instead of hearing the roar of each individual ship’s propeller, what we heard was a sustained shrieking blast of pure white noise, in which nothing could be distinguished at all.
    Happily, Professor Zhou did exist. Not only did he exist, but when Mark went to look for him at Nanjing University (I was ill that day), he was actually in and agreed to come and have dinner with us at the Jing Ling Hotel (by which time I was better because it was quite a good restaurant).
    He was a polite, kindly man of about sixty. He guided us graciously through the unfamiliar menu and introduced us to the local delicacy, namely Nanjing Duck. This turned out to be very similar to Peking Duck (or Beijing Duck, as we now know it—or, to be strictly accurate, Szechwan Duck,which is what we have been eating for years under the name Peking Duck. We had some wonderful Szechwan Duck in Beijing, because that’s what they eat there. Beijing Duck is something different and comes in two courses, the second of which is usually not worth bothering with). To conclude: Nanjing Duck turned out to be very similar to Szechwan Duck except that they spoil the thing by coating it with a solid half-inch layer of salt. Professor Zhou agreed that it didn’t taste nearly as pleasant that way, but that was how they did it in Nanjing.
    Professor Zhou welcomed us to China, was surprised and delighted that we had come all this way to see the dolphins, said that he would do everything he possibly could to help us, but didn’t think it would do us any good. Things are difficult in China, he confided. He promised to try and phone the people at the dolphin conservation project in Tongling to warn them that we were coming, but didn’t hold out much hope of reaching them because he’d been trying to get through to them on his own account for weeks.
    He said that, yes, we were right. The noise in the Yangtze was a major problem for the dolphins, and severely interfered with their echolocation. When the dolphins heard a boat, their habit had always been to make a long dive, change direction underwater, swim under the boat, and surface behind it. Now, when they are under the boat, they get confused and surface too soon, right under the