I went to the shops to buy some bread.

Newly rescued from the desert, she faintingly asked for water.

Zhu arrived in Xinjiang in 1975 as a “sent-down youth,” part of a Communist Party initiative that sent educated urban youths to live in the countryside to further China’s Maoist revolution. A member of China’s Han ethnic majority, he was 17 when he departed prosperous Jiangsu province on China’s east coast for Kargilik, a remote county amid the deserts and steppes of China’s far northwest. Uighurs, the region’s largest ethnic group, had long chafed under official discrimination and economic marginalization under Beijing.

Constable Greg Fisher reported on the trip to Mason and Starvation bays and the chat with Billy Mather, none of which had generated anything of real interest except for the tip about the grey nomads who′d passed through.