Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [61]
Rudra Cakrin descended the plane first, with Drepung right behind him. A triumphant blaaaaaaaaaaaa of brass long horns shattered the air so violently it seemed it might squeeze out rain. This was the brazen sound that had alerted Anna to the existence of the Khembalis in the first place, on the day of their arrival in the NSF building.
Everyone receiving them bowed; they looked down upon the black hair and colorful headgear of several hundred people. Joe goggled to see it, mouth hanging open in a perfect O.
Descending into this throng they were surrounded by their hosts, including two women from the Khembalung Institute of Higher Learning, who introduced themselves to Anna; she had been corresponding with them by e-mail. They took the visitors in hand, leading them slowly through the crowd and introducing them to many of the people they passed.
Soon they were through the airport’s little building, and bundled into a van that drove them east on a broad, palm-lined boulevard of dusty white concrete. On each side extended flat fields, divided by rows of trees or shrubbery. Small building complexes stood under drooping palm trees. Many of the plants looked desiccated, even brown.
“There has been drought for two years,” one of their guides explained. “This is the third monsoon season without rain, but we have hopes it will come soon. All South Asia has been suffering from these two bad monsoons in a row. We need the rain.”
Anna had heard a lot about this from her contacts with ABC, the “Asian Brown Cloud” study, which was trying to determine if the long-term persistence of particulates in the air of south Asia—mysterious in their exact origins, although clearly linked to the industrialization and deforesting in the region—had any causal effect on the drought.
In any case it made for a rather drab and stunted landscape. No plants they saw were native to the island, they were told as they drove through the dust cloud of the bus before theirs. Everything was tended; even the ground itself had been imported, to raise the island a meter or two higher. Nick asked where the extra ground had come from, and they told him that a few surrounding islands had been dredged up and deposited here, also used to provide the raw material for the dike. It had all been done under the direction of Dutch engineers some fifty years before. Very little had been done since then, as far as Anna had been able to determine. The dike was in sight through the trees wherever they went, raising the horizon a bit, so that it felt a little like driving around in a very large roofless room, blasted with hazy harsh sunlight, the sky like a white ceiling. The inner wall of the dike had been planted with flowerbeds that when in bloom would show the usual colors of the Tibetan palette—maroon and saffron, brown and bronze and red, all gone or muted now but the blue and black patches, which were made of painted stones.
In a little town they got out of the van and crossed a broad pedestrian esplanade. The sea breeze poured over them in a hot wave, briny and seaweedy. The smell of the other Sundarbans, perhaps.
“Will we see more swimming tigers?” Nick inquired. He observed everything with great interest, looking cool in his sunglasses. Joe had refused to wear his. He was taking in the scene so avidly he was in danger of giving himself whiplash, trying to see everything at once. Anna was pleased to see this curiosity from the boys; clearly America had not yet jaded them to the beauty and sheer difference of the rest of the world.
Their guides took them in the biggest building, the Government House. It was darker inside, and with their sunglasses on, seemed at first black. By the time they had taken off sunglasses and adjusted to the relative gloom, they found Joe had run off ahead of them. The room displayed the post-and-beam construction characteristic of Himalayan buildings, and the rough-hewn posts in each corner were hung with demon masks.
They followed Joe over to one of these collections. Each mask grimaced rotundly,