A Szechwanese Dies

Land of the flying horse, of dwarfs and golden monkeys and of citizens with tails is China's province of Szechwan, the Western Heavens of the ancient poets. Here are houses built with small doors so that giants may not enter; here live Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and 46,823,665 people, and here is the world's only source of giant pandas.

In Szechwan three years ago a native found a baby giant panda, replete with tender bamboo shoots, logily sitting on a log, bagged her, sold her to U.S. rarity-trappers. Third of the seven live pandas to enter the U.S., the five-week-old Bei-Shung (white bear) became Pandora of The Bronx Zoo. In her cage she prowled and played and delicately nibbled asparagus tips, a conscious comic who put even sophisticates in stitches with her improvised routines.

But last February Pandora, now age 3, began to toy with her Pablum mash. Gradually she sickened, by last week was having convulsions. One day police sirens screamed from The Bronx to Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center ahead of a zoo station wagon. Pandora, quieted by nembutal, was lifted in a stretcher, borne into the famed Neurological Institute, whisked to the tenth-floor X-ray room.

Noted Roentgenologist Cornelius Gysbert Dyke supervised X-rays as Pandora whiffed ether. Next day Pandora was brought back for more tests. The Institute's chief, Tracy Putnam, himself tapped Pandora's spinal cord, drew fluid for tests. On the electroencephalograph, which records brain impulses as clues to tumors or other disturbances, Pandora flopped: her too-thick skull thwarted doctors looking for variations in the alpha, beta and delta waves.

The medicos then performed a pneumo-encephalomyelogram, in which spinal fluid is withdrawn, replaced with oxygen little by little; then took X-rays. In such X-rays the oxygen outlines the brain ventricles, indicates the presence of growths. But Pandora's brain showed none. The famed specialists scratched their heads, brooded, figured, studied smears on slides. Next afternoon, the sick panda, far from the Western Heavens of Szechwan, the nine sacred mountains, the flying horses and the golden monkeys and the citizens with tails, slept quietly under a drug when death, as it must to all animals, came to Pandora.

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