“Is everything all right?” Margaret asked anxiously.

Li nodded. “A fuel problem. But it’s okay.”

Yongli withdrew his map from inside his shirt and handed it across Margaret to Li. “You can navigate.”

Li flicked on the courtesy light and ran his eyes quickly over the large, pristine map of the Middle Kingdom. He snorted. “There’s only one road. To Erhlien.”

“Then just make sure we stay on it.” Yongli’s gloom had been replaced by agitation. He seemed excitable, almost hyper. He thrust a pack of cigarettes at Margaret. “Here, light one for me.” She passed them to Li who lit two and passed one back to Yongli. He dropped the stick into fourth gear and they picked up speed, trundling north parallel with the railway line, heading for the wide open spaces of Inner Mongolia and the northern reaches of the Gobi Desert.

They left the lights of the city behind them with some relief. The road passed among hills that marked the farthest limit of Shanxi province, and through the remains of a huge broken-down wall that stretched to the east and west. “The Great Wall of China,” Li said. But it wasn’t so great here, where it had been allowed to fall into disrepair and was little more than a heap of rubble and stones. For a while the road followed it, before swinging north again, leaving the hills behind, and entering the dark, vast emptiness beyond.

III

It was around three hundred miles to the international border with Mongolia, once known as Outer Mongolia because of its relationship to the Middle Kingdom. They planned to make the journey in a little over six hours, Yongli dropping them as close as possible to the border, allowing them to cross during the hours of darkness. But none of them had considered the possibility of a puncture three hours into their journey, or the fact that their pick-up would not be equipped with a jack.

Yongli kicked the tyre in frustration. He knew he should have checked there was a jack before they left. The brace would unscrew the wheelnuts, but they had nothing to lift the truck, allowing them to remove the wheel. Ironically, the spare was sound and well filled with air.

The pick-up sat at an angle on the camber of the road, tilting down towards the nearside rear wheel. Moonlight shimmered off into the distance among the endless swaying acres of grassland. The only sound was of the wind whistling through the grass. It was a wind soft on the skin and filled with the sweet scent of wild flowers. A vast black sky bejewelled with stars spread above them like a dome, the moon a brilliant silver orb passing through its firmament. The road vanished to distant points behind and ahead of them. They were stranded and exposed, with nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.