The Abundance (19 page)

JUNE 1923:
The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on muleback in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of what was then called Peking. He saw from the mule what he had often seen in Egypt years before: “the burnt stones of the desert and the sand of the dunes in the dusk.” This was the Ordos, the Inner Mongolian Desert.

The Ordos is a desert plateau—3,000 feet high, spreading 35,000 square miles—from which mountains rise. The Great Wall separates the Ordos from the fertile lands to the east and south in Shansi and Shensi Provinces.

He was forty-two years old, tall and narrow, fine-featured. He wore a big felt hat like a cowboy and heavy boots. Rough weather had cut lines on his face. He had carried stretchers during World War I for a regiment of sharpshooters. His courage at the front—at Ypres, Arras, and Verdun—won him several medals which the surviving men of his regiment requested for him. One of his fellows recalled his “absolute contempt for danger”
as he mounted parapets under fire. They shortened his name—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—to simply Teilhard, “Tay-YAR,” as it's pronounced in French.

His characteristic expression was simple and natural, according to one scientist, who also noted that his eyes were “filled with intelligence and understanding.” Another colleague described him as “a man of self-effacing and irresistible distinction, as simple in his gestures as in his manners. . . . His smile never quite turned to laughter. . . . Anxious to welcome, but like a rock of marble.” From the back of a jog-trotting mule, he could spot on stony ground a tiny rock that early man had chipped.

On some days in the Ordos, he and his geologist partner dug, excavated, and sifted the ground. On other days they moved in caravan. They rode with two Mongolian soldiers—to fight bandits—and five so-called donkey boys. “On the third day,” he wrote a friend, “we arrived at an immense steppe over which we traveled for more than six days without seeing much else but endless expanses of tall grasses.” He passed the garnet and marble gorges of the Ula-Shan, “the old crystalline shelf of China.”

July 1923: Teilhard was one of the men who unpacked the expedition's three donkeys and ten mules for the night. Bandit raids had routed them from the steppes
and forced them to enter the badlands. That night he and the others pitched their two white tents in the Ordos massif, within a circle of red earth cliffs. In one red cliff he found, by daylight, the fossil remains of extinct pachyderms from the Pliocene.

“The immense hazard and the immense blindness of the world,” he wrote, “are only an illusion.”

The scant rain that reaches the Ordos falls in thunderstorms. During one storm, Teilhard wrote a letter. “Of this part of the journey, the crossing of the Arbous-Ula will remain in my memory as the finest stage. The innumerable strata of this savage mountain, a forward bastion of the Ula-Shan on the right bank of the Yellow River, end gently into two long concentric folds which seem to unfurl over the eastern solitudes.”

August 1923: Once more they pitched their tents in the desert, in a circle of cliffs. They camped for a month, in the southeast corner of the Ordos, where the cliffs were gray, yellow, and green. Here the great eroded loess hills met the sands laid by the river called Shara-Osso-Gol. And here they found the world's first evidence of pre-Neanderthal man in China. (People lived in China long before Neanderthals lived in Europe.) The man of the yellow earths, Teilhard named him, for loess is fine
yellow dust. They found his traces in the Shara-Osso-Gol's twisted canyon.

First they struck Neanderthal tools ten meters down: scrapers, gravers, quartzite blades. Then they dug through sixty-four feet of sand before they revealed an ancient hearth where Paleolithic people cooked. Their blackened hearth near the river made a thin layer among cross-bedded dune sands and blue clays. No hominid bones were there, but some tools lay about, and the hearth was indisputable—the first trace of human life north of the Himalayas.

The people who made these fires by this river about 450,000 years ago, before the last two ice ages, were not
Homo sapiens
. They were
Homo erectus,
or Peking Man. During their time, the Outer Mongolian plateau to the north continued its slow rise, blocking Indian Ocean monsoons; the northern plateau dried to dust and formed the Gobi Desert. The people would have seen dust clouds blow from the north, probably only a few big dust clouds every year.
Such dust today!
they must have thought. After the people vanished, the dust continued to blow across their land; it laid yellow and gray loess deposits hundreds of feet deep. Almost 4,500 centuries passed, and in 1222 Genghis Khan and his
hordes rode ponies over the plateau, over these hundreds of feet of packed loess, over the fecund dust and barren sand, over the animal bones, the chipped blades, and the hearth. Teilhard thought of this, of Genghis Khan and the ponies. “Much later,” he wrote, “Genghis Khan crossed this plain in all the pride of his victories.” At that time the Mongols made stirrups and horseshoes from wild-sheep horns.

Teilhard found a twentieth-century Mongol family living in the Shara-Osso-Gol canyon. Their name was Wanschock. The father and his five sons helped Teilhard excavate during the weeks he camped. The Wanschocks rode horses, kept goats, and lived in a cave scooped out of a cliff in the loess. They taught their toddlers to ride by mounting them on sheep. “The Mongols wear long hair,” Teilhard wrote, “never take off their boots, are never out of the saddle. The Mongol women look you straight in the eyes with a slightly scornful air, and ride like the men.”

“Throughout my whole life,” he noted later, “during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.”

Why is there sand in deserts? Where does it come from? Why is there sand on beaches? I always thought ocean
waves made sand on the seashore: Waves pounded continents' rock and shattered it to stone, gravel, and finally sand. This, I learned, is only slightly true.

Lichens make more sand than ocean waves do, as do ice salt crystals. On mountaintops and on hillsides you see cracked rock faces and boulders. Lichens grow on them, in rings or tufts, secreting acids that break down the minerals. First the lichens widen cracks in the rock, then growing salt crystals split them further, until finally freezing water shatters them.

Glaciers make some sand: Their bottoms pluck boulders and stones that scour all the land in their paths. When glaciers melt, they leave behind outwash plains, boulders, rocks, gravels, sand, and clay—which is sand ground down to floury powder. Winds lift the sand and bear it aloft.

Mostly, the continents' streams and rivers make sand. Streams, especially, and fast rivers bear bouncing rocks that knock the earth, and break themselves into sharp chips of sand. The sand grains leap—saltate—downstream. This is why the banks and the bottoms of most streams are sandy. Look in any small stream in the woods or mountains, as far inland as you like. That stream is making sand, and sand lies on its bed. Caddis-fly larvae use it as stones for their odd masonry houses.

Rivers bear sand to the sea. As rivers slow, they drop
their sand, and harbors silt up and deltas spread. If the land's rock is fresh lava, as it is in Tahiti and on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, then the sand the streams bear down to the beaches is black. If the inland rock is basaltic, like the Columbia River plateau's, the sand the river carries to beaches is dark and fine. If the rock is granite, as it is in the eastern United States, the sand is pale quartz and feldspar.

When Los Angeles and Orange Counties dammed their intermittent streams, all the beaches from Los Angeles to Newport Beach lost their sand supply. Those weak hillside streams, which had never even flowed year-round, had supplied all that sand. Now beach towns buy up dredged harbor sand to ship and dump on their coasts to make beaches.

Coastal currents smear sand round the continents' edges, but except where waves beat cliffs, ocean waves do not make stony sand. Mostly, waves and longshore currents spread river sand coastwise, and waves fling it back at the continents' feet. Ocean waves crumble dead coral reefs. And parrot fish eat coral polyps. The fish do not digest the corals' limey bits, but instead defecate them in dribbles, making that white coral sand we prize on tropical beaches. Little or no sand lies under the deep oceans.

So why is there sand in deserts? Because windblown sand collects in every low place, and deserts are low,
like beaches. However far you live from the sea, however high your altitude, you will find sand in ditches, in roadside drains, and in cracks between rocks and sidewalks.

Sand collects in flat places, too, like high-altitude deserts. During interglacials, such as the one in which we live now, soils dry. Clay particles clump and lie low, while sand grains part and blow about. Winds drop sand by weight, as one drops anything when it gets too heavy for one's strength. Winds carry light stone dust—loess—far afield, though it stays put in only a few places: in the rich prairies in central North America, and in precious flat basins of China and Russia.