In the western world, to ring a bell or sound a horn is usually an aggressive thing to do. It carries a warning or an instruction: 'Get out of the way', 'Get a move on', or 'What the h.e.l.l kind of idiot are you anyway? If you hear a lot of horns blowing in a New York street you know that people are in a dangerous mood.

In China, you gradually realise, the sound means something else entirely. It doesn't mean, 'Get out of my way, a.s.shole', it just means a cheerful 'Here I am'. Or rather it means, 'Here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am...', because it is continuous.

It occurred to me as we threaded our way through the crowded, noisy streets looking for condoms, that perhaps Chinese cyclists also navigated by a form of echolocation.

'What do you think?' I asked Mark.

'I think you've been having some very strange ideas since we came to China.'

'Yes, but if you're weaving along in a pack of cyclists, and everyone's ringing their bells, you probably get a very clear spatial perception of where everybody is. You notice that none of them have lights on their bicycles?

'Yes...'

'I read somewhere that the writer James Fenton tried riding a bike with a light on it in China one night and the police stopped him and told him to take it off. They said, "How would it be if everyone went around with lights on their bicycles?" So I think they must navigate by sound. The other thing that's extraordinary about cyclists is their inner peace.'

'What?

'Well, I don't know what else it can be. It's the extraordinary, easy unconcern with which a cyclist will set off directly across the path of an oncoming bus. They just miss a collision which, let's face it, would not harm the bus very much, and though they only miss by about nine millimetres the cyclist doesn't appear even to notice.'

'What is there to notice? The bus missed him.'

'But only just.'

'But it missed him. That's the point. I think we get alarmed by close sc.r.a.pes because they're an invasion of s.p.a.ce as much as anything else. The Chinese don't worry about privacy or personal s.p.a.ce. They probably think we're neurotic about it.'

The Friendship Store seemed like a promising place to buy condoms, but we had a certain amount of difficulty in getting the idea across. We pa.s.sed from one counter to another in the large open-plan department store, which consists of many different individual booths, stalls and counters, but no one was able to help us.

We first started at the stalls which looked as if they sold medical supplies, but had no luck. By the time we had got to the stalls which sold bookends and chopsticks we knew we were on to a loser, but at least we found a young shop a.s.sistant who spoke English.

We tried to explain .to her what it was we wanted, but seemed to reach the limit of her vocabulary pretty quickly. I got out my notebook and drew a condom very carefully, including the little extra balloon on the end.

She frowned at it, but still didn't get the idea. She brought us a wooden spoon, a candle, a sort of paper knife and, surprisingly enough, a small porcelain model of the Eiffel Tower and then at last lapsed into a posture of defeat.

Some other girls from the stall gathered round to help, but they were also defeated by our picture. At last I plucked up the bravado to perform a delicate little mime and at last the penny dropped.

'Ah!' the first girl said, suddenly wreathed in smiles. 'Ah yes!'

They all beamed delightedly at us as they got the idea.

'You do understand? l asked.

'Yes! Yes, I understand.'

'Do you have any?

'No,' she said. 'Not have.'

'Oh.'

'But, but, but...'

'Yes?

'I say you where you go, OK?

'Thank you very much. Thank you.'

'You go 616 Nanjing Road. OK. Have there. You ask "rubberover". OK?

'Rubberover?

'Rubberover. You ask. They have. OK. Have nice day.' She giggled happily about this with her hand over her mouth.

We thanked them again, profusely, and left with much waving and smiling. The news seemed to have spread very quickly around the store, and everybody waved at us. They seemed terribly pleased to have been asked.

When we reached 616 Nanjing Road, which turned out to be another, smaller department store, and not a knocking shop as we had been half-suspecting, our p.r.o.nunciation of 'rubberover' seemed to let us down and produce another wave of baffled incomprehension.

This time I went straight for the mime that had served us so well before, and it seemed to do the trick at once. The shop a.s.sistant, a slightly more middle-aged lady with severe hair, marched straight to a cabinet of drawers, brought us back a packet and placed it triumphantly on the counter in front of us.

Success, we thought, opened the packet and found it to contain a bubble sheet of pills.

'Right idea,' said Mark, with a sigh. 'Wrong method.'

We were quickly floundering again as we tried to explain to the now slightly affronted lady that it wasn't precisely what we were after. By this time a crowd of about fifteen onlookers had gathered round us, some of whom, I was convinced, had followed us all the way from the Friendship Store.

One of the things that you quickly discover in China, is that we are all at the zoo. If you stand still for a minute, people will gather round and stare at you. The unnerving thing is that they don't stare intently or inquisitively, they just stand there, often right in front of you, and watch you as blankly as if you were a dogfood commercial.

At last one young and pasty-faced man with gla.s.ses pushed through the crowd and said he spoke a little English and could he help?

We thanked him and said, yes, we wanted to buy some condoms, some rubberovers, and we would be very grateful if he could explain that for us.

He looked puzzled, picked up the rejected packet lying on the counter in front of the affronted shop a.s.sistant and said, 'Not want rubberover. This better.'

'No,' Mark said. 'We definitely want rubberover, not pills.'

'Why want rubberover? Pill better.'

'You tell him,' said Mark.

'It's to record dolphins,' I said. 'Or not the actual dolphins in fact. What we want to record is the noise in the Yangtze that . . . it's to go over the microphone, you see, and...'

'Oh, just tell him you want to f.u.c.k someone,' muttered Chris, scottishly. 'And you can't wait.'

But by now the young man was edging nervously away from us, suddenly realising that we were dangerously insane, and should simply be humoured and escaped from. He said something hurriedly to the shop a.s.sistant and backed away into the crowd.

The shop a.s.sistant shrugged, scooped up the pills, opened another drawer and pulled out a packet of condoms.

We bought nine, just to be on the safe side.

'They've got aftershave as well,' said Mark, 'if you're running out.'

I had already managed to dispose of one bottle of aftershave in the hotel in Beijing, and I hid another under the seat of the train to Nanjing.

'You know what you're doing?' said Mark as he spotted me. I'd thought he was asleep.

'Yes. I'm trying to get rid of this b.l.o.o.d.y stuff. I wish I'd never bought it.'

'No, it's more than that. When an animal strays into new territory, where it doesn't feel at home, it marks its pa.s.sage with scent, just to lay claim. You remember the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar? They've got scent glands in their wrists. They rub their tails between their wrists and then wave their tails in the air to spread the scent around, just to occupy the territory. That's why dogs pee against lampposts as well. You're just scent-marking your way round China. Old habits die hard.'

'Does anyone happen to know,' asked Chris, who had been lolling sleepily against the window for an hour or so, 'what the Chinese for Nanjing actually looks like? I only ask so as we'll know when we've got there.'

At 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.

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.

'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.'

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.

We made straight for the revolving top-floor bar like rats from a sack and sat huddled for safety round a cl.u.s.ter 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, looking 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 s.p.a.ce invaded by bicycles. Unfortunately 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.

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, was 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 mult.i.tudes of bicycles was like the distant drumming of hooves. From here the bewilderment of Shanghai seemed like a remote warm memory of home.

The river was not deep enough at the bank for our sound experiment, and we slogged our way through the acc.u.mulating rain towards the docks in search of deeper water. We shook our heads at the occasional importunate cries from pa.s.sing bicycle-driven rickshaws, being too sunk in gloom to admit even the possibility of relief.

We found a temporarily deserted pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sengers and playing Richard Clayderman at them. We 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 b.u.t.ton 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?' has a familiar ring in any language.

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. As 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.

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. But 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.

Happily, Professor Zhou did exist. Not only did he exist, but when Mark went to look for him at Nanjing University (I was ill that day), he was actually in and agreed to come and have dinner with us at the Jing Ling Hotel (by which time I was better because it was quite a good restaurant).

He was a polite, kindly man of about sixty. He guided us graciously through the unfamiliar menu and introduced us to the local delicacy, namely Nanjing Duck. This turned out to be very similar to Peking Duck (or Beijing Duck as we now know it - or, to be strictly accurate, Szechwan Duck, which is what we have been eating for years under the name Peking Duck. We had some wonderful Szechwan Duck in Beijing, because that's what they eat there. Beijing Duck is something different and comes in two courses, the second of which is usually not worth bothering with). To conclude: Nanjing Duck turned out to be very similar to Szechwan Duck except that they spoil the thing by coating it with a solid half-inch layer of salt. Professor Zhou agreed that it didn't taste nearly as pleasant that way, but that was how they did it in Nanjing.

Professor Zhou welcomed us to China, was surprised and delighted that we had come all this way to see the dolphins, said that he would do everything he possibly could to help us, but didn't think it would do us any good. Things are difficult in China, he confided. He promised to try and phone the people at the dolphin conservation project in Tongling to warn them that we were coming, but didn't hold out much hope because he'd been trying to get through to them on his own account for weeks.

He said that, yes, we were right. The noise in the Yangtze was a major problem for the dolphins, and severely interfered with their echolocation. The dolphins' habit had always been, when they heard a boat, to make a long dive, change direction underwater, swim under the boat and surface behind it. Now, when they are under the boat, they get confused and surface too soon, right under the propellers.

These things had all happened very suddenly, he said. The Yangtze had remained unspoilt for millions of years, but over the last few years had changed very dramatically, and the dolphin had no habit of adaptation.

The very existence of the dolphin had not been known of until relatively recently. Fishermen had always known of them, but fishermen did not often talk to zoologists, and there had been a recent painful period in China's history, of course, when n.o.body talked to scientists of any kind, merely denounced them to the Party for wearing gla.s.ses.

The dolphin was first discovered, in Dong Ting Lake, not in the Yangtze, in 1914 when a visiting American killed one and took it back to the Smithsonian. It was obviously a new species and genus of river dolphin, but little further interest was taken in it.

Then, in the late fifties, Professor Zhou returned from a field trip studying birds, to find an unlabelled skeleton waiting for him. It was the same species of dolphin, but this had been discovered, not in Dong Ting Lake, where they no longer existed, but in the river near Nanjing.

He interviewed some local fishermen who said they did see them from time to time. Any that were accidentally caught were sold for food. The ones that got caught in the fishing lines had a bad time of it, because the lines the fishermen traditionally use along the banks of the Yangtze are baited with hundreds of large, bare hooks.

Some studies were carried out around Nanjing, but for a while the Cultural Revolution put a stop to all that. Research picked up again in the seventies, but the difficulties of communication within China were such that research was only local, and no one really had a feel for exactly how rare the animal was, or what kind of predicament it was in.

That all changed in 1984.

Some peasants found a baiji stranded in the shallows near Tongling, further upriver. They reported it to the Agricultural Commission of the Tongling Munic.i.p.al Government, who took an interest and sent someone along to take a look at it.

This immediately began to flush out a whole lot of stuff.

All sorts of. people were suddenly popping up and saying that they had also seen a dolphin hit by a boat or caught in a net or washed up in a b.l.o.o.d.y mess somewhere.

The picture that emerged from putting all these hitherto isolated incidents together was an alarming one. It was suddenly horribly apparent that this dolphin was not merely rare, it was in mortal danger.

Professor Zhou was brought along from Nanjing to a.s.sess what should be done. Here the story took an unusual and dramatic turn, because once he had a.s.sessed what should be done . . . the people of Tongling did it.

Within months a huge project was set up. to build a dolphin protection reserve within the Yangtze itself, and now, five years later, it is almost complete.

'You should go to see it,' said Professor Zhou. 'It is very good. I will try my best to phone them to prepare for your arrival, so you may rest . . . what is the word?

I said that rest sounded fine to me. I was all for some rest.

'Easily? Surely? Ah . . . a.s.sured. You may rest a.s.sured that they will not be expecting you. So I will give you a letter also.'

For various reasons which had to do with making a diversion to see an alligator farm from which we then got chased by police on the grounds that we did not have the appropriate alligator permits, we ended up taking a taxi to Tongling, a mere one hundred and twenty miles. We got a special deal on the taxi. Part of the special deal was that we didn't have a very good taxi driver, or indeed a very good taxi, and we arrived in Tongling in a state of some nervous tension.

Foreigners are not allowed to drive in China, and you can see why. The Chinese drive, or cycle, according to laws that are simply not apparent to an uninitiated observer, and I'm thinking not merely of the laws of the Highway Code, I'm thinking of the laws of physics. By the end of our stay in China I had learnt to accept that if you are driving along a two lane road behind another car or truck, and there are two vehicles speeding towards you, one of which is overtaking the other, the immediate response of your driver will be to also pull out and overtake. Somehow, magically, it all works out in the end.

What I could never get used to, however, was this situation: the vehicle in front of you is overtaking the vehicle in front of him, and your driver pulls out and overtakes the overtaking vehicle, just as three other vehicles are coming towards you performing exactly the same manoeuvre. Presumably Sir Isaac Newton has long ago been discredited as a bourgeois capitalist running dog lackey.

Tongling, in turn, made us long wistfully for the cheerful, familiar hominess of Nanjing.