Chapter 1 Letter from the Nile
Chang Geng decided to settle the matter on the Nile River boat.
The boat was a kind of triangular sailboat used by the locals. The wood was so old that it turned black. The sails were patched several times and swelled into a rickety chest when the wind blew. She boarded the boat from Aswan and walked south for three days. First there were temples and date palm trees on both sides of the river, and then only ocher-red rocks and a narrow line of green remained. The boatman's name is Hassan, he is sixty-seven years old and missing two front teeth.
She was thinking of someone.
That person's name is Gu Yinghuo. The first time she heard the name was in a youth hostel in Cairo. A German backpacker looked through her sketchbook and saw an acacia tree she had drawn. He said the tree reminded him of a friend. That friend is a botanist who studies the symbiotic relationship between acacias and giraffes in Kenya. The name is very strange, "Gù Yíng Huò", Chinese.
The tip of Chang Geng's pencil broke.
"What did you say?" She asked.
The German spelled the name on a crumpled napkin. She looked at the six letters, and her heart was suddenly grasped by something. It's not a feeling of distress, it's that hollow feeling that rises in your stomach when you stand on the edge of a cliff and look down. She had never heard of this person, but the moment the name fell on her retina, a picture flashed in her mind -
A man was standing at a very high place, and the wind blew up the corners of his clothes. He turned around and could not see his face clearly against the light.
There was only one tiger tooth, which flashed in the light.
"Where is he?" Chang Geng asked.
The Germans said that the last time they contacted him, Gu Yinghuo was studying a shrub called "waxay" by the locals in the Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia. There was no news after that. He may have gone to Kenya, or he may have gone north to Sudan. Anyway, that person never used a mobile phone. The last time he sent an email was four months ago, saying that he was near Lake Turkana and planned to walk along the Rift Valley.
Conception:-