ÑAt Nanjing we had our first sight of the river. Although Shanghai is known as the gateway to the Yangtze, it isn't actually on it, but is on a connecting river called the Huangpu. Nanjing is on the Yangtze itself.
Ñ It is a grim town, or at least we found it to be so. The sense of alien dislocation gathered us more tightly into its grip. The people we found to be utterly opaque, and would either stare at us or ignore us. I was reminded of a conversation I had had with a Frenchman on the plane to Beijing.
Ñ 'It is difficult to talk to the Chinese people,' he had said. 'Partly it is the language, if you do not speak Chinese, but also, you know, they have been through many, many things. So they think it is safer perhaps to ignore you. If they talk to you or do not talk to you they are paid the same whatever, so, pfffft.
'I think if they get to know you they talk a little more, perhaps, but pfffft.'
Ñ The sense of dislocation was sharpened by the presence, in the centre of town, of a single major western-style high-rise hotel, called the Jing Ling. It was an anonymously grand conference-holding, revolving- bar-and-atrium-ridden modern hotel of the sort that generally I heartily dislike, but suddenly it was like an oasis to us.
Ñ We made straight for the revolving top-floor bar like rats from a sack and sat huddled for safety round a cluster of gin and tonics. After twenty minutes or so of sitting in these unexpectedly familiar surroundings, we found, as we gazed out of the panoramic windows at the vast, alien, darkened city which turned slowly around us, that we felt like astronauts in a vast, warm life-support system,
Ñlooking out over the hostile and barren terrain of another planet.
We were all seized with a sudden desire not to have to go out there any more, not to have to be stared at, ignored, spat at, or have our personal space invaded by bicycles.
ÑUnfortunately the Jing Ling had no free rooms, and we were ejected into the night to find lodging in an altogether grimmer crumbling hotel on the outskirts, where we sat and thought, once more, about the dolphins out in their filthy river and how we were to make our recording.
Ñ On a day darkened with drizzle we stood on the bank of Yangtze, watching the great drifting sea of sludge which flows sullenly from the depths of China. The only colour in a heavy landscape of dark brown shading to grey, against which long, black, smoke-belching silhouettes of diesel-engined junks thudded and growled up the river,
Ñwas a little pink knotted condom dangling limply on the end of a cable attached to Chris's tape recorder. The half-heard swish of unseen multitudes of bicycles was like the distant drumming of hooves. From here the bewilderment of Shanghai seemed like a remote warm memory of home.
Ñ The river was not deep enough at the bank for our sound experiment, and we slogged our way through the accumulating rain towards the docks in search of deeper water. We shook our heads at the occasional importunate cries from passing bicycle-driven rickshaws, being too sunk in gloom to admit even the possibility of relief.
Ñ We found a temporarily deserted passenger ferry lolling against the creaking dock and trudged up the gangplank. The ferries are big, hulking, five-decker wedges, which look like immense, soiled slices of lemon gateau grinding daily up and down the Yangtze, each carrying upwards of a thousand cramped passengers and playing Richard Clayderman at them.
ÑWe found our way through a series of bulkhead doors to a deck which overlooked the river, where Chris tried hopelessly to dangle the little pink thing with its button microphone down into the murky waters. It would scarcely reach, was blown about by the wind, and when at last it dropped down to the water it sat perkily on top of it.
Ñ There was another deck below us, but it proved difficult to find - the innards of the boat continually deflected us with bolted doors. At last we solved the maze of it and emerged once again overlooking the river, several feet lower.
Ñ 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.
Ñ 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.
Ñ 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.
Ñ The mere idea of even attempting to account for ourselves defeated 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.
ÑAs 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.
Ñ 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.
ÑBut 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.
