Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

welded to one,” she told him.
    He nodded. ”Then you can understand the shock when people discover that
I live in a world inhabited by rabbits that talk and mice who rescue small
boys.”
    ”Well—yes,” she admitted, smiling. ”Yes, that could be a shock.”
    ”It is,” he assured her. ”Usually there’s an instinctive withdrawal,
then a look of suspicion, followed by a hearty ‘By Jove that’s nice,’ and a
very hasty retreat. I must say you’ve taken it rather well, though.”
    ”Not a great deal surprises me,” admitted Mrs. Pollifax. ”Not anymore, at
least. It must surely make for a very good life?”
    ”Oh yes I’m very fortunate,” he said lightly. ”I do only one book a year
now, and that leaves six months for travel or for anything else that appeals.”
    Six months, she mused, turning this over in her mind; yes there were
certain possibilities there, and his books made for wonderful cover. ”Are you
hoping for a book from this trip?”
    He said softly, ”Oh I think not, but it will refresh me. I’m looking
forward intensely to the Qin Shi Huang Tombs—”
    ”Oh yes!”
    ”—and the museums and temples. And sketching, of course.”
    They had been driving through darkening streets—there were no street
lights—and now as night arrived there were only dim electric lights shining
yellow in the apartments along the streets. Glancing up she could look into the
windows and see a single feeble bulb suspended from the ceiling, see the dark
silhouette of a man standing at a window peering out, glimpse a face seated at
a table reading, the light etching the face in chiaroscuro. Hong
Kong ’s fluorescent lights had been stark clear white,- here the
color was a yellow that barely illuminated the dark caves of rooms.
    ”Surely those can’t be more than twenty-watt bulbs?” she murmured to
Malcolm, pointing.
    ”Twenty-five at most,” he said.
    Huge dark China , she thought, moved by the silence, the absence of cars, and the
darkness.
    The buildings thinned until the headlights of the bus picked out
mud-brick walls, then lines of trees with only a solitary light to be seen at a
distance—a commune, perhaps-and then at last the bus turned down a graveled
road that ran through a thinly wooded area, lights gleamed ahead, and they drew
up before a huge, raw, half-finished modern building.
    ”I hope,” said Mrs. Pollifax
with feeling, ”our hotels aren’t always
going to be this far out of town.”
    ”The question being,” Malcolm said, extending a hand to her, ”whether
they’re trying to keep us from meeting the people, or the people from meeting
us.”
    They walked into a huge echoing lobby that was almost a parody of
contemporary architecture: a few self-consciously Danish chairs, a very Art
Deco cobblestone fish pond, with a fountain springing out of its base. They
were the only people in the cavernous lobby except for a young woman behind a
desk who passed out room keys to them.
    ”Bags outside rooms at half-past seven,” said Mr. Li. ”We do not return
here to the hotel tomorrow, remember.”
    ”It would take hours to get back here anyway,” commented Iris, and
received an answering smile from George Westrum.
    Mrs. Pollifax entered room 217, found it bland but comfortable, with hot
water running from its sink taps, and promptly ran a bath and climbed into it.
She carried with her a book on China ’s
history to read, but she did not read it. She was too busy wondering instead
what lay ahead of her in this vast country; she wondered what the others were
thinking, and who among them was thinking ahead to Xian, and then to Xinjiang Province lying to the north of them. She
was remembering, too, the strange assortment of items that she’d brought into China with her,
the stores of vitamin pills and dried fruit, the thermal socks, and chocolate.
She remembered Carstairs saying, ”It’s almost as impossible to get an agent
into China as it is to get a
man out of China .”
    Out of China ... this was the question that had occurred and reoccurred to her before
her departure; how did they plan to get X out of China ? It was a
question that had sent her to the very good topographical map in her
encyclopedia, and the result had chilled her because Xinjiang Province,
thousands of miles from the sea, bordered Tibet and Pakistan and Afghanistan,
its desert running like a flat carpet to the terrible mountain ranges of the
Kunluns and the Karakaroms. Thermal socks, dried fruit,