Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

apparent to her yet. She was delivered to the entrance of the
Guesthouse, gave the driver a handful of feng, and returned to face the
heat of her room, passing Jenny and Forbes seated talking under the luxurious
grape arbor. She felt only a little giddy as she examined her treasures from
the bazaar and put them away but when she left her room for lunch and
sightseeing she wore a dripping wet towel wound around her head. She did not
plan to nearly faint again under Turfan’s sun, and if her day had just been
extended by a cart ride into the country with Peter, it would at least be
cooler by night.
     
    There were no keys to the rooms here, so that when Peter knocked softly
on her door at ten that night he followed this by quickly slipping inside.
Speaking in a low voice he said, ”We can leave by your window.” He was carrying
his dufflebag and he placed it now on her bed. ”What do you have?” he asked.
    ”A second padded quilted jacket from Xian,” she told him crisply. ”In
Urumchi I bought two sheepskin vests, one small blanket, and of course, there
are the vitamins and dried foods I carried with me. And to fit all this into my
suitcase,” she reminded him, ”I had to leave almost everything behind in
Urumchi except my pajamas. Even,” she added sternly, ”my hairbrush.”
    ”I’ll lend you mine,” he said dryly. ”How are you carrying it all?”
    ”Rolled up in a bundle.” She pointed to it sitting on the floor beside
the chair.
    ”And may one ask what’s happened to your two lower front teeth?” he
asked with interest.
    ”Ah,” she remarked happily, ”that was a dental bridge. I noticed an old
lady in the bazaar this morning with missing teeth, and I thought it would add
an authentic note to my disguise.” She knotted the plain cotton kerchief around
her head, patted her cotton jacket and leaned over to adjust the buckles on her
cloth shoes. ”Shall we go?”
    Peter unlatched the screen, removed it, helped her over the sill and
followed, replacing the screen behind them. In single file they stole up the
path in the darkness, passing the lighted rooms of the others and coming to a
stop at a certain place in the wall where the top had crumbled, releasing the
pointed shards of glass embedded in its cement to repel intruders. Tossing both
dufflebag and bundle over the wall, they were soon outside the compound and
moving toward the street’s corner.
    The cart was waiting with Sheng Ti beside it. A fuzzy moon dimly
illuminated his features,- he gave them and their luggage a glance that
unsettled Mrs. Pollifax by its thoughtful speculations. He said, ”I go with
you?”
    Peter smiled and shook his head. ”No, we’ll be okay. Back in two hours.”
    ”I did not steal it,” Sheng added, his eyes running curiously over Mrs.
Pollifax’s cloth shoes, pants, and quilted jacket.
    ”Good,” Peter said and tossed their baggage into the rear, handed Mrs.
Pollifax up to the seat with a flourish and squeezed in beside her.
    Sheng Ti handed him the reins. ”Zaijian,” he said, and stepped
back into the shadow of the wall.
    The donkey moved, the cart lurched, the wheels gave one outraged groan
and they were underway; when Mrs. Pollifax glanced back Sheng Ti had vanished.
A lone cyclist pedaled toward them in the darkness and called out a greeting;
Peter returned it, slipping easily and gratefully into Chinese. ”But I think we
stop now and make our eyes slant before we run into anyone else,” he said, and
pulled up beside a vacant stretch of wall.
    ”What a peculiar contraption,” said Mrs. Pollifax when he shone his
flashlight once and very quickly, after inserting it under her hair.
    ”The amazing thing is that it doesn’t hurt and it can’t be seen—and now
you are a true Han,” he told her, and she saw the flash of his smile in the
faint moonlight.
    Slowly they proceeded down the road and out of Turfan, occasionally
meeting cyclists as they returned from work or pedaled to work, the pale moon
etching black shadows of walls and trees across the darkness of the road. A dog
barked. A voice was heard from behind a wall. Other than the clip-clop of the
donkey’s hoofs and the movement of the wheels there was only the silence of the
desert around them.
    ”How absolutely beautiful to be free for a couple of hours!” said Peter
with a happy sigh.
    Since Mrs. Pollifax was already experiencing this same reaction—a sense
of elation at being out and into the space around her and free of Mr.