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and sophisticated machinery like aeroplanes going together. Flying was still virtually unknown in the East and all those things airmen had learned to expect in Europe and America, even after only a few short years, would be conspicuous here only by their absence. For the first time he had begun to realise that petrol wasn’t something you merely ordered or indented for. In China you had to find it first and, having found it, you had to make sure that corruption and graft didn’t cause it to be immediately lost again. Spare parts would be as precious as gold dust and even trivial things like nuts and bolts would be jewels in a land where a wooden peg was still used to hold a cart or a plough together.
     
    The Whangpoo, where the ship dropped anchor, was a muddy little river twelve miles up the Yangtze. It was seething with life, sampans moving about like swarms of black water beetles and tugs fussing round vessels anchored in midstream or at the busy wharves. River steamers with black and red funnels, top-heavy with their tiers of decks, came past, sirens booming at the sampans, and junks with poops and prows like twin pagodas, and huge coloured eyes on the bows, manoeuvred awkwardly on the swiftly flowing tide.
    As the ting-ting of the bridge telegraph ringing to stop engines came to their ears, the sun began to go down, turning the whole river into molten gold. Even here, in midstream, the vast noisy life of China intruded, the number of boats and vessels indicating the turbulent existence that went on ashore. As they stared over the stem, against the lights of Shanghai a ghostly junk slid past, so close they could see its magenta sail was webbed like a bat’s wing and jigsawed with patches, and could hear the rhythmic chant of the crew straining at the huge stern oar. The smell that passed with it was powerful and nauseating.
    ‘Bouquet de bloody Orient.’ Lawn’s harsh voice came from the foredeck. ‘The old foo-foo barge. Shit.’
    He was obviously in his element, as Sergeant Lawn, ex-corporal of the York and Lancasters who had served in Hong Kong before.
    He was gesturing at the junk as it sailed past them. ‘Night soil they call it,’ he was saying to Geary. ‘But shit’s shit, isn’t it, even on Judgment Day? That bloody pong’s all over China, mate--cities, villages, paddy fields. They use it for manure. Gets you in the end so’s you never even notice it.’
    Ira stared down at him, wondering what he’d let himself in for. He’d long since decided he didn’t like Geary and he was beginning to feel now he probably wouldn’t like Lawn either.
    ‘The women are all right, mind,’ the harsh voice went on relentlessly. ‘Big Russian bits down from Vladivostok. All pink and white and blonde, with tits like footballs. Princesses escaping from the Revolution, they say. If you fancy something with a title, Shanghai’s the place to find it.’
    As the ship worked alongside next morning under a heavy sky, Ira stared across the water to the line of the bund. Shanghai was an odd mixture of East and West and the United States, with its electric signs and brash advertisements and big square hotels. There were far more cars even than there had been in Nairobi and trams groaning round every comer, and there seemed to be people of all nationalities living there--British, American, French, Japanese, Slavs, Croats, and Russians who had fled from the Bolsheviks.
    Blue-clad coolies, hawking and spitting as they worked, swarmed along the bund and across the junks that covered the water like a heaving mat--selling food, lifting bales, pulling carts or huge wheelbarrows whose single wheels all screeched fiendishly like slate-pencils dragged across a slate. The din was appalling. The honking of launches and the roaring of klaxons were overlaid by the incessant high-pitched yelling of the Chinese labourers, toy sellers, sweet sellers, goldfish sellers, cooked-noodle sellers, flower-design sellers--vendors of every