Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

simply, ”He has been instructing Iris in the butchering of
his steers and how they are sent to market, with side excursions into profit
and loss. He sits behind me, I can’t help overhearing. I doubt he’s noticed an
inch of the country we’ve been passing through.”
    ”And where is Joe Forbes on your scale of ten?” she inquired.
    He smiled. ”Not the loner I first thought him to be. There’s that need
to please, and to smile all the time, plus that lamentable determination to
practice Chinese on the guides and to ingratiate himself. I think in general he
might be called an Ingratiator.”
    Mrs. Pollifax, finding his pithy comments almost as interesting as
Cyrus’ might have been, asked, ”And Iris?”
    He brushed this query aside impatiently. ”Iris is simply Iris.”
    ”Meaning what?”
    He smiled, his quizzical brows drawing together. ”Why, an original, pure
and simple. A transformer and a transcender.”
    ”You like her then,” said Mrs. Pollifax. ”Or appreciate her. Yet give
every evidence of avoiding her.”
    He grinned. ”I avoid George, to be blunt about it, and since he’s in
constant attendance on Iris, well—there it is.”
    ”And Jenny?”
    Malcolm stopped smiling. ”A rather troubled person, don’t you think? The
trip seems to be putting her under enormous pressures. Nice little thing, a
pity. I have the feeling—”
    ”Psychically or intuitively?” intervened Mrs. Pollifax humorously.
    ”Pressure,” he said, ignoring this, ”can go either way, it creates
diamonds, it also creates explosions. What are your feelings on the matter?”
    ”At the moment—given her tears the other night—I think explosions.”
    ”Followed, one hopes, by clearing skies,” he said. ”At the moment she
seems extremely cross about Peter having a nap. Do I see green up ahead?” he
asked. ”Yes, a rather dusty green but definitely green. Do you think we’re
approaching Turfan?”
    This seemed possible because Mr. Kan was unwinding his microphone and
presently standing up to explain Turfan to them: a city with a population of
120,000, containing seventy farms and where, for about thirty days of the year,
the temperature lingered at 113° F., and in winter descended to twenty below
zero... Its irrigation system was unique, consisting of underground tunnels,
some of them two thousand years old, through which the runoff from the distant
mountains reached this desert city... And this afternoon they would be
introduced to this underground system. Whereupon he promptly sat down.
    ”Short but to the point,” said Malcolm, ”and since the air
conditioning’s just been turned on it’s doubtless 113° Fahrenheit right now.”
    ”I see we’re back to red clay,” mused Mrs. Pollifax, looking out of the
window. ”My goodness, I just saw a field of cotton.”
    Soon she was seeing grapevines, too, and mysterious greenery growing
behind the walls of compounds, but here there were wooden bars set into the
clay windows, and large wooden gates in the walls that showed the Turkish
influence Peter had mentioned. On this road it was small tractors that pulled
the wooden carts; presently they passed a traffic jam of army trucks, and then
a bazaar shaded by squares of canvas and surrounded by parked donkey carts and
bicycles. ”And here we are,” announced Mr. Li as they swung down a broad dirt
road and turned left into a large compound of whitewashed walls. ”The
Friendship Guesthouse. Lunch in one hour!”
     
    A square hot room with cement floor and walls,- two narrow beds and a
window; a huge round fan whirring at top speed on the bureau,- a bathroom with
a shower tap, a dripping faucet, and no tub or stall... Mrs. Pollifax went to
her door and called after the others, ”Anyone want to walk to that bazaar down
the road before lunch?”
    Iris poked her head out from the door of the room next to hers. ”I take
it your room’s as hot as mine? Count me in!”
    Jenny said defiantly, ”Joe and I are going to sit in that grape arbor
and check our cameras.”
    But Peter said, ”I’d love a walk!”
     
    Once in the bazaar Mrs. Pollifax bought recklessly for X: several ripe
golden melons, tiny apricots, raisins, nuts, and a string bag in which to carry
them, and for herself a pair of cloth shoes and a kerchief. She was about to
add some grapes to the collection when she abruptly felt giddy and close to
fainting. The heat, she decided, a strange kind of heat because the sun was
only moderately bright.