Thirty

IT WAS DARK; ALMOST dawn.

The village street was sandy, and strewn with leaves, as if a wind had been blowing hard, and scattered them. There were only half a dozen houses, with deep porches raised off the ground. An oil light burned under one of them, pasting the faintest pool of yellow light. Under it, a dog was asleep, his scrawny body twitching as he pursued phantoms in the fields of sleep.

Anna was standing on one of the porches now. Something had been put close to her hands. She touched the smooth, lacquered surface in the darkness, her fingers feeling around the square packs that were stacked one on top of the other. On each corner, she could feel metal fastenings, and, between each thick wooden frame, the edges of paper. Each frame, in turn, was packed in a wooden box. She ran her hands down the boxes, counting them. Nine.

Nine plant presses, to take the herbarium specimens for the arboretum. Nine plant presses, and a thousand driers. Every night, the driers and the specimens were changed. She saw the European now, in this dark, rain-soaked place, carefully unfolding the paper from its rubberized wrapping, lifting the leaves with the edge of a penknife, replacing them again on dry blotting paper; each leaf, each seed, each flower, while the rain dripped incessantly from the roof above him, into the unpaved mire of the street.

She walked down the porch, and saw the rest of the baggage piled in the doorway, ready for an early departure. Compass, barometer, pedometer, and altimeter; the journal, the camera; the quinine sulphate to treat malarial fevers; permanganate of potash, salts, insect powder, and opium. Close to the man’s bed would be his gun, and the money supply. String cash, strung on cords around his neck, little coins no bigger than a dime, with a square hole cut in the center, a thousand on each string.

Next to Anna, the dog stirred. She looked down at it, and at the first gray details as the light strengthened. Then, she walked into the hut.

The man was lying on a bench by the door. He was awake, and lying motionless with his palms crossed on his chest, staring up at the beams of the roof. Flattened by his hands and held to his chest was a piece of paper. Then, he turned on his side, and swung his legs over the edge of the makeshift bed. He pulled on his jacket, picked up his boots, took them to the door, where he slowly inspected them, shaking them out. He put them on, and laced the puttees over the top. Then he turned back, picked up the piece of paper, and took it back to the door, turning it so that it caught the light from the oil lamp.

She saw then what it was that he had been holding.

It was a map, drawn on a notebook page. There was no scale. Two parallel lines along the top indicated the route of the Yangtze; two dropping vertically down showed its tributary, the Kuan Ho River. To the north, someone had written in capital letters, Patung District. To the west, Wushan; to the east, Chienshih. A small rectangle to the very right of the page was named Tai Ho Shan, a mountain that did not even appear on any map yet drawn. Neither did Mo Chang Kou, a settlement indicated by a little pencil circle. Yet it was vitally important that he find these places. It was why he was here. It was why he had traveled thirteen thousand miles. It was the reason he had gone to Yunnan to see Augustine Henry.

Because, in the center of the page that Henry had drawn for him weeks before, was a tiny scrawled message. Sandwiched between the words Wushan and Chienshih was the word Davidia.

The area where Augustine Henry had said it could be found, represented on the piece of paper now in the dawn light, was not too accurate. In fact, a lesser man might have given up entirely as he had watched Henry draw it. Because it was the equivalent of a needle in a haystack; perhaps one very small, almost microscopic needle in the largest haystack imaginable. The map represented an area of twenty thousand square miles. And the Davidia was in the center of it. One flowering Davidia, a solitary specimen that Augustine Henry had witnessed only once, ten years before.

The village was above five thousand feet, and the only inn was set on a steep slope.

After two days’ march, and having stayed in what could only have been described as a hovel the night before, where the lice kept the men awake, and the stink was overpowering, they had tramped through what seemed to them a numberless amount of ascents and descents. Standing on any summit, there was no level ground to be seen in any direction. The razorlike ridges cut north to south, their sides and valleys covered in thick woodland.

In the valleys, the musk rose was everywhere—Anna could smell it now—and flowering cherries; and honeysuckle and philadelphus, mock orange. As they came down through one of the descents into woodland, Anna saw the man ahead of her stop, not to collect seed, but simply to close his eyes and inhale the perfume of the place. It hung so heavy in the air that to walk through it was like parting invisible veils. The aroma clung to her. She walked all around him, and thought she saw David in his face.

They began descending an almost vertical slope, slipping on the leaf mold underfoot. She looked up and saw the beeches over her head, some almost upright with a single trunk and a vastly spreading head of branches; others, much taller, but springing from the ground in eight or ten evenly-sized trunks slanting away from each other, as if someone had arranged a great bouquet of light gray stems.

“We’re almost there,” David said. “Hold on to me. Walk forward.”

She did as she was told, though her feet were numb with cold. Her hands, too. Her lips, and mouth. She felt the faint resin grain of her tongue against her teeth. She felt her index and second and third fingers, but not her fourth, and not her thumb. She felt her chest, heavy as though pressed by a weight, barely moving to breathe. To walk with this body was both difficult and easy. She was carrying an assemblage of parts. Sometimes her progress was swift, faster than a thought. Sometimes she hesitated, at breathless drops into nothingness. At the shadow of a fern leaf across her path.

The inn was a rambling, two-storied place, with outhouses and a large courtyard. Because the ground sloped so steeply away, the front of the structure was supported on posts. As they came closer to it, the fragrance of the mountain behind them was rapidly lost; she realized that there were piggeries among the outhouses, and the stench from the inn itself, mixed with burning incense and candle wax, almost choked her.

The man passed in through the low doorway. The owner of the inn appeared out of the half-darkness. There were minutes of polite introduction; of the brewing of green tea, and the taking of it in the gloomy stink of the only room. Finally, the man asked the question he had traveled so far to answer. Was there a tree nearby that the Chinese called the k’ung-tung?

The owner furrowed his brow until the tree was described. Then, he smiled broadly.

Yes, there was such a tree.

And was the tree close by?

It was down the mountain further.

Only a mile.

Just a mile, Anna thought. Beyond exaltation or hope. Only a mile.

They got up, to the accompaniment of more polite bowing. The man walked out, back into the sunlight. With the houseboy trotting ahead of them along the path, with a sheer drop at one side, and the low outhouses on the other, they followed him until the inn was swallowed up behind them by thick groves of willow. They saw two or three houses along the path, tiny places with bamboo roofs. Then, at last, they came to a clearing, where a larger house stood.

“Is the tree here?” the man asked.

Yes, the boy nodded.

This is the tree.

And he ran and put his hand on the house, and on the low roof beam that almost skirted the ground. He was smiling broadly and with pride. It was his father’s house. His father, he said, was a good builder, and he had cleared the ground. He had taken down the house that had been here, and built another.

The man didn’t understand. Utter confusion filled Anna’s head. “Where is the tree?” he asked again.

The boy walked forward, and touched the overhanging eave of the house.

“Sir,” he said. “I am very sorry. But they have cut down the tree for the roof.” He turned back, spreading his hands in a helpless gesture. “It was a very old tree,” he said. “And it was an excellent wood for building.”