The People's Preferred Methods of Transportation

It was as if they'd stepped into Dante's Inferno, and William was reminded of the one not written by Dante Alighieri in the early 1300s, but the one directed by Harry Lachman in the mid-1930s (Lachman also directed other films including Charlie Chan in Rio [1936], Baby Takes a Bow [1934], The Face in the Sky [1933], La Couturii¨re de Luni©ville [1932], The Compulsory Husband [1930]) and Week-End Wives [1929], but Dante's Inferno starred Spencer Tracy [whose birth name was Spencer Bonaventure Tracy, which is a very cool name considering it quite likely that Tracey may have at one time portrayed John Paul Jones in a play or a movie and Jones's most famous ship was named the Bonhomie Richard, which sounds somewhat like Bonaventure, and that he supposedly had a long affair with Katherine Hepburn, though she only conveniently revealed the affair after his death in order to spare his long-dead wife the embarrassment when he couldn't deny it, and, since she, Hepburn, was practically a man anyway, she could very well have been named Richard like the ship, and it must have been an adventure to have even spent any time at all around her-an adventure good or bad at home or abroad. Sort of like the one they were having now.)

Why did William know these things? No one would ever know.

It was those kind of coincidences which really bugged him at times like that - stuck in the pedestrian tunnel under the Xi'an Train Station with about 50,000 other people, though it was a safe bet that they were the only not-Chinese people in the whole shaft. The 300 pounds of luggage didn't help; the little squeaky-wheeled luggage cart did help a little bit but the luggage itself didn't.