It’s evening again, and the goal of the journey is Zhenjiang, and now, by all appearances, they can really attribute their having come to Zhenjiang to coincidence, if coincidence exists, and if it has been the one to guide their fingers along the map, but it doesn’t exist, says László Stein to himself, and it is not coincidence that has led his fingers, as will be completely clear in a moment, because after a good hour, cutting across the Yangtze, they head into Zhenjiang, and in the dark they see the first streets and the first people, and they no longer believe in any kind of coincidence, only in an unbending, malicious, brutally just and — to them — inordinately unfriendly spirit which, in fleeing from Yangzhou, led them to this place, so they could see, after the wretchedness of Nanjing, after the disappearance without a trace of Yangzhou, that there was still farther, farther to go, that is: farther to go downward, to sink ever lower in the experience of disillusion which this time bears the name of Zhenjiang, the trading city with a population of 2 million, at the crossroads of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze, which this time is known as the place where Wang Anshi[41] was born, and where Mi Fei[42] died, and about which it is bruited that here stands the Wenzong Ge pavilion[43] where the people of bygone times, guarding their treasures with such care, kept watch over the famous collection of volumes, the Siku Quanshu.[44] An evil spirit is following them and guiding them, and, no matter what they try to do against it, the struggle is futile, Stein perceives this towards the end of the first hour, futile, he sums up — and in subdued tones! — his feelings to the interpreter: not only are they in the wrong place with their useless interest but also, since their first steps here, nothing but evident ill fortune could be their companion, and behold, they wave down an indescribably filthy taxi, and begin to hunt for a hotel, picked out earlier from some travel guide and the only one in that district designated as ‘acceptable’, an adventure in which the problem is not that the taxi driver cannot locate the hotel but, rather, that he does locate it, as the hotel — which now, in 2002, as the travel guide emphasizes, is the only acceptable choice — is unequivocally closed, and it is how it is closed that is so horrifying, standing there mutely and darkly in its assigned place, in wholly infernal abandonment: above, on the facade, the name can still be deciphered, according to which this is the Dahuangjia Jiudian, or the ‘King Hotel’, but the windows are crudely boarded up, the entrance barricaded with sheets of iron, wooden boards, plastic sheeting, as visible as the clearly hopeless attempts to break in again and again, because this barricade is already half smashed apart, and, even though you can neither see nor go in, it’s as certain as death that there is nothing inside any more, absolutely nothing which could be stolen: the building’s fate of being broken into again and again — perhaps to the point of its complete destruction — is completely senseless, yet these break-ins will occur, continuously and indefatigably; they stand there, silent, as behind their backs the taxi’s ailing engine, like the breath of a dying man, falters for short periods, they cast a glance at the infinitely indifferent face of the taxi driver and it is clear he knew that there was nothing here, that the best they could do right now would be to make themselves scarce, to leave this place today, to go back to where they came from, but if they want to, they can pester him some more, he’s in no hurry and he will take them wherever they tell him to go, and he does, to the closest hotel which is open, and they pay him two-thirds of the amount they had bargained for — which, however, was doubled in the end — so they lose out, and they gain, as here in New China most often occurs with foreigners, then they take a mangy room, which cannot be bargained down to less than 150 yuan, on the second floor of the Fenghuang Ling hotel, originally vainly conceived as glittering but where everything is penetrated with misery, and from this point on they don’t speak a word to each other, they just make an attempt at washing in the water stained with brown rust, then they give up and eat the remains of their food purchased at the bus station in Yangzhou, then they lie down on the beds, like people who have been knocked down by sheer physical exhaustion, and they sleep until next morning. The Wenzong Ge pavilion no longer exists, nor does the renowned Siku Quanshu; the house where Wang Anshi was born is completely gone, just as on Beigu Mountain,[45] not a single genuine component of the monastery remains, but this isn’t as horrifying, as they began their baneful foray into Zhenjiang, as the fact that