`Do you know how long they surface for? I asked Mark.
‘Yes…’
‘And?
`It isn’t good news. The dolphin’s melon, or forehead, breaks the surface first, as it blows, then its small dorsal fin comes up, and then it plunges down again.’
`How long does that take?’
`Less than a second.’
`Oh.’ I digested this. `I don’t think we’re going to see one, are we?’
Mark looked depressed. With a sigh he opened a bottle of baiji beer, and took a rather complicated swig at it, so as not to take his eyes off the water.
`Well, we might at least see a finless porpoise,’ he said.
`They’re not as rare as the dolphins, are they?’
`Well, they’re certainly endangered in the Yangtze. There are thought to be about four hundred of them. They’re having the same problems here, but you’ll also find them in the coastal waters off China and as far west as Pakistan, so they’re not in such absolute danger as a species. They can see much better than the baiji, which suggests that they’re probably relative newcomers. Look! There’s one! Finless porpoise!’
I was just in time to see a black shape fall back in the water and disappear. It was gone.
‘Finless porpoise!’ Mr Ho called out to us. `You see?
`We saw, thanks!’ said Mark.
`How did you know it was a finless porpoise? I asked, quite impressed by this.
`Well, two things, really. First, we could actually see it. It came right up out of the water. Finless porpoises do that. The baiji doesn’t.’
‘You mean, if you can actually get to see it, it must be a finless porpoise.’
‘More or less.’
`What’s the other reason?
°Well, it hadn’t got a fin.’
An hour drifted by. A couple of hundred yards from us big cargo boats and barges growled up the river. A slick of oil drifted past. Behind us the fish nets fluttered in the wind. I thought to myself that the words ‘endangered species’ had become a phrase which had lost any vivid meaning. We hear it too often to be able to react to it afresh.
As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze I realised with the vividness of shock, that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain and fear.
We did not manage to see a dolphin in the wild. We knew that we would at least be able to see the only one that is held in captivity, in the Hydrobiology Institute in Wuhan, but nevertheless we were depressed and disappointed when we arrived back at our hotel in the early evening.
Here we suddenly discovered that Professor Zhou had managed to alert people to our arrival after all, and we were astonished to be greeted by a delegation of about a dozen officials from the Tongling Baiji Conservation Committee of the Tongling Municipal Government.
A little dazed by this unexpectedly formal attention when we’d just been going to slump over a beer, we were ushered in to a large meeting room in the hotel and shown to a long table. A little apprehensively, we sat on one side along with an interpreter whom they had provided for the occasion, and the members of the committee carefully arranged themselves along the other.
They sat quietly for a moment, each with their hands neatly folded on top of each other, on the table in front of them, and looked distantly at us. My head swam for a moment with the hallucination that we were about to be arraigned before an ideological tribunal, before I realised that the distant formality of their manner probably meant that they were at least as shy of us as we were of them.
One or two of them were wearing a type of grey uniform tunic, one was wearing the old Maoist blue tunic, others were more casually dressed. They ranged in age from about mid-twenties to mid-sixties.
`The committee welcomes you to Tongling,’ began the interpreter, `and is honoured by your visit.’ He introduced them one by one, each in turn nodding to us with a slightly nervous smile. One was the Conservation Vice-Chief, another the Association Chief-Secretary, another the Vice Chief-Secretary, and so on.