It wasn't the sound of an ordinary pendulum. The sound, amplified and analyzed through the mist, precisely struck the resonance point of three different sounds with each tick. The lingering echo of camel bells, the reverberation of an icefall, and the aftershock of a mailbox all found their anchor in the rhythm of the pendulum. The air in the waiting room seemed to become a giant resonating chamber, the sound waves forming visible ripples in the mist, spreading out in circles, hitting the walls, and reflecting back, overlapping with the sound of the next pendulum swing.
“Resonance…” Zhong Hua looked at the fluctuating audio waveform on his phone screen. The peaks and troughs that represented camel bells, icefalls, and mailboxes were now perfectly aligned with the sound waves of the wall clock, forming a stable and profound resonance curve.
The hazy sonic waveform began to shrink. The points of light representing the number of days of travel, the peaks of light corresponding to the altitude, and the nodes that burst forth with the orange light of Qinghai Lake and the white light of Yubeng Snow were all converging towards the center. The mixed scents became richer: sandalwood soap, Gobi sand, yak butter tea, and a new aroma joined in—the musty smell of letters in an old wooden box, the chemical smell of old camera film, and the chill that clung to their down jackets when they gazed at the stars at Namtso Lake.
As the last pendulum rang, the fog abruptly shrank into a single point of light. The point of light hovered between the two, like a frozen star. Ayu reached out her hand, and the point of light gently landed in her palm; it was cold, yet carried the memories of all her scents and sounds.
The lights in the waiting room suddenly returned to normal. The noise of the construction crew drifted in from outside, and Old Chen could be faintly heard shouting, "Watch out for that wall!" The hands of the wall clock were stopped at 10:18, as if they had never moved. The nautical timetable on the bulletin board was still peeling, and the cracks in the floor tiles still resembled the crater of Weizhou Island.
But Zhong Hua and A Yu both knew that what had just happened was not an illusion. The light spots in A Yu's palm gradually disappeared, leaving only a faint, mixed scent, much like the ink that had been accidentally spilled on the last page of their travel diary, the smudged marks forming the shape of the Yunnan-Tibet Highway.
Zhong Hua picked up his phone; the recording from earlier was still there. He hesitated for a moment, then decided not to delete it.
"Let's go back," Ayu said softly, her eyes still lingering with the orange glow of Qinghai Lake and the white light of Yubeng Village.
The two walked out of the waiting room side by side, the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station reflecting golden light in the setting sun. Behind them, the pendulum of the wall clock continued to tick, but this time, Zhong Hua and A Yu both understood—it wasn't just the sound of time, but a perfect resonance of all the scents and sounds collected by time, occurring in a fleeting moment. And their journey, their memories, the peaks and troughs of their lives, all became a unique soundtrack in the long river of time within this resonance.
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