Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

here and there a hand lifted or a head turned slightly as if to
listen. Silent and waiting they filled the hall, so alive in gesture and stance
that surely, she thought, they must be breathing as they stood there, liberated
from the earth that had held them for nearly two thousand years.
    Malcolm, coming to stand beside her, said simply, ”My God.”
    She smiled, liking Malcolm. ”It’s a mighty emperor who goes to his grave
with—how many?” she asked.
    ”The latest count is five hundred terra-cotta warriors, six war
chariots, and twenty-four horses, with thousands more expected.”
    Iris, joining them, whistled, and the three of them stood there, staring
down into the trenches, absorbed and awed until Mrs. Pollifax, recovering,
began to be aware of a very odd sensation of tension flowing between Malcolm
and Iris. Strange she thought, standing between them. She glanced curiously at
Malcolm, but he was staring at the figures below,- she looked at Iris, but she
too was staring straight ahead, her lips still pursed in a whistle, and then
George Westrum came up to claim Iris and the tension snapped. But for just a
moment Mrs. Pollifax felt that she’d stumbled into a kind of energy-force
field, and since she was not accustomed to picking up vibrations so strongly it
left her puzzled. Perhaps this place is a little haunted, she thought,
and wondered what had happened to her.
    Iris and George walked away together and Malcolm wandered on, his
sketchbook in hand. When Mrs. Pollifax resumed strolling it was Peter who fell
in with her.
    ”Seems a good time to get friendlier,” he said with his wry half-smile.
”We leave for Urumchi late this afternoon and I’ve been doing my homework.”
    ”Productive?” she asked, trying not to look eager in case anyone was
watching.
    ”Definitely.” His voice was crisp, with an undercurrent of excitement.
”It looks good—ideas begin to blossom. Nothing’s jelled yet but I’m absolutely
certain now that the thing can be pulled off, all of it.” With a nod toward the
excavations he added, ”What do you think?”
    ”Incredible. Spooky, even, they feel so alive.”
    ”He was a bit of a bastard, that first emperor,” Peter said pleasantly.
”Burned books. Executed his friends. Made some pretty severe laws. But,” he
added, ”the laws he made were the first the country ever had, and one of them was
to banish feudalism, even if it did pop back after his death. He pulled a lot
of warring states together and gave the country shape and unity, and without
all that China might never have tamed the Xiong nu during the next dynasty.”
    ”Tamed who?”
    ”Hsiung-nu —the horse people, the nomads from the steppes who
swarmed through the passes of the Altai and Tian Shan ranges to attack... Mongols and Turkic people. That’s where we’re heading later
today, you know, into frontier country. Urumchi, Turfan, the Tarim Basin, the
Tian Shans, the Taklamakan desert. Back in 221 b.c. it
was China ’s
wild west, the far frontier.”
    ”Genghis Khan, perhaps?”
    ”Yes, eventually. What riders they must have been, sweeping down from
the mountains into the desert, with towns changing hands at the drop of a
crossbow!”
    ”And has it been tamed now?” she asked, picturing what he spoke of in
her mind.
    ”It’s not been made an Autonomous Region for nothing,” he told her. ”I
gather the central government still has its problems there and has had to make
a few compromises. Not easy trying to organize nomads into communes, and
Moslems into good Communists. A great number of ethnic groups live there —it
was the Silk Road , after all!—the Uyghurs
being in the majority.”
    ”Weegurs?” she repeated.
    ”Yes, but spelled U-y-g-h-u-r, which may give you an idea of the
language you’ll meet there, most of the words being pronounced with strange
gargling sounds. For instance the word for good-bye is hox, which you
pronounce horrssh, and aromat is thank you, but comes out rock-met, slightly gargled. In any case, Mao tried to solve the Uyghur majority by
sending thousands of Chinese into the province to settle among them, but
basically it’s Moslem country and they’ve had their share of incidents,
so-called.”
    ”Uprisings?” asked Mrs. Pollifax in surprise.
    ”Passive resistance would probably describe it better. In fact,
something like sixty thousand Kazakhs simply left China in 1962, going over the
border into Soviet Kazakhstan.”
    ”How absolutely fascinating,”