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Ma drove down to a cluster of work tents about three meters above the river. He had Hulan and David wait by the Jeep, then jogged over to one of the larger tents. When he returned, he had cold-water bottles and hats for each of them. Now that they didn’t have the breeze from the open Jeep, the heat was crushing. There were a few trees, all of which were dwarfed and deformed as if from some disease, so the camp had no relief from the sun except under the tarpaulins. And while it seemed unbelievably dry with all of the dirt and rocks, the air itself was thick with the humidity that rose off the river, exacerbating the worst aspects of this Give-Up Weather season.
After handing off the water bottles, Ma said, “It seems I have a double audience and a double duty here. Attorney Stark, you’ve been sent by my boss to check on me and my missing artifacts.”
No one disagreed with this assessment.
“And you, Inspector Liu, have come from that most worrisome of places—the Ministry of Public Security—to investigate what happened to a young man who was my responsibility. That’s the kind of checking I really don’t like. But it seems that, in either case, I have no choice. So, before I show you what I think happened to Brian and what I know about the thefts, I want to explain a little about what we’re doing out here. I think it will help Attorney Stark and at the same time give you, Inspector, a sense of the people we’re working with and our goals.”
Ma pointed up the hill to where most of the work seemed to be happening. “We’re standing about a fifth of the way up from the river to the top of the site. Most archaeological sites in the Three Gorges are classified as ‘second tier,’ which means they’re located between one hundred twenty-five and one hundred fifty-five meters above river level. Even today, towns and villages in this area are found well above the reach of floodwaters. Time has left behind layer upon layer of history in these platforms. The dam, when completed, will reach—”
“One hundred and seventy-seven meters,” David finished.
“Exactly, which means that most towns and nearly all archaeological sites along the ri
ver, this one included, will be inundated. These last three years—with help from our foreign friends—we’ve excavated not just in areas that are exposed to the elements but in the caves as well.”
“Caves?” David asked.
Ma again pointed up the hill to several dark openings in the earth. “This whole hillside is honeycombed with caves.”
The pattern was set. David asked questions; Hulan listened and looked around. He was direct; she preferred the indirect.
“Come, let’s walk.” Ma set a vigorous pace up the trail. Hulan felt sweat trickle down the backs of her legs, and she took a drink from her water bottle. But if Ma expected his visitors to show any signs of physical weakness, he was mistaken. David was in great shape. He ran every day, even in the heat of the Beijing summer, and Hulan had the toughness of having spent her youth at the Red Soil Farm in the harsh countryside. Hard physical activity in relentless heat ranked as only a slight inconvenience.
“Our main interest is the Ba civilization,” Ma resumed. “We believe one of the reasons the Ba people settled here was that the caves offered protection from the elements. They were also good places to hide in times of danger. You may not know this, but China has more caves than any other country in the world. You came down from Chongqing, right? During the war with the Japanese, the people of Chongqing hid in caves during air raids. Today many of those caves are shops. Actually, about forty million people live in caves throughout China. Do Americans use their natural resources so well, Attorney Stark?”
“Can’t say we do.” David responded to the challenge with equanimity.
“And of course nearly every province in China has caves renowned for the beauty of their stalactites and stalagmites. We also have caves filled with Buddhist carvings….” Ma paused just long enough for them to catch it, then added, “But I guess you know that.”
So Ma knew a bit about David and Hulan, which meant, if nothing else, that he’d read the newspaper coverage of the Knight factory debacle five years ago. Hulan gave him a cool look.
“As an archaeologist, I’ve been in many caves in many countries,” Ma continued easily. “I’m always touched by the idea that once people used those dark holes in the earth not only as means of artistic or religious expression but also to record their daily lives—the animals brought down in a hunt or the battles won. People were leaving history on those walls even before written language was invented. Unfortunately, although we continue to look, we have yet to find any artifacts in the Site 518 caves. Primarily we scrape at the ground in the pits, looking for artifacts, looking for the past, looking for civilization, looking for the lives of the people who came before us.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” David asked.
Ma sighed, then said, “Thanks to your Indiana Jones, many people think that archaeologists are treasure hunters. We aren’t. Our group—archaeologists interested specifically in the Yangzi watershed—has four questions that fascinate and perplex us. We call them the Four Mysteries, and I’m sure you’ll hear about them at lunch, although you never know. The people on our team have many interests.” He quirked his head. “How much do you know about archaeology, Attorney Stark?”
“Your mandate is to prove five thousand years of continuous culture.”
“Real culture, as opposed to a few people huddled around a fire carving crude weapons from stone,” Ma said, then motioned for them to sit on some large boulders. “For years scholars suspected that people may have lived in the gorges during the Stone Age, but it wasn’t until this final push before inundation that Paleolithic sites dating from 50,000 to 12,000 B.C. were located. We’ve also found Neolithic sites, one of which is right here beneath our Ba excavations. The ceramics that we’ve uncovered are stylistically different from those found outside the gorges. We think this means that the Qutang Gorge must have been some sort of cultural divide. So Mystery One is why did societies in the Three Gorges area—and the Qutang Gorge in particular—develop so independently? Mystery Two: the Chu Mausoleum….”
Hulan tuned out his words and tried to imagine Brian McCarthy in this landscape. Site 518 was far larger than she’d imagined, extending up and down the hillside. The land was terraced, but whatever cultivation had occurred here was long gone, leaving only dirt and rocks. Peasants crisscrossed the dusty terrain with wheelbarrows, while others—Chinese students and foreigners—squatted in pits sheltered by tarpaulin canopies.
The longer Hulan sat here, the more she could catch snippets of conversations drifting down the hill to them. The day workers spoke only Chinese, while the students and foreigners spoke the international language of science—English. From across the way she heard an older man—American—say to a young woman with long bare legs, “You’re running out of time. If you want that to happen, then you’ve got to….” Then the young woman nodded toward Hulan. When the man turned and saw her too, the rest of his sentence evaporated. He waved, said something more to the young woman that Hulan didn’t catch, then the two of them walked over to the boulders to meet Ma’s visitors.
Ma interrupted his recitation of the Four Mysteries and introduced David and Hulan to Stuart Miller and his daughter, Catherine. Hulan didn’t need to hear Ma’s flowery praise to know Stuart’s accomplishments. He owned Miller Enterprises, a conglomerate with multiple subsidiaries, including Miller Engineering. The state-run Chinese press called Miller “a good friend to China,” who had shown his friendship in many ways. Most recently he’d signed a billion-dollar contract to provide crews, expertise, and machinery for the building of turbines for the Three Gorges Dam. He was a distinguished-looking man, in his early fifties. His daughter had gotten her good looks from her father. Catherine’s hair hung in long, lustrous brown curls. Heavy mascara and eyeliner outlined mesmerizing deep brown eyes. Voluptuous young breasts pushed against the fabric of her T-shirt. Her lips were full, and for a second Hulan wondered if she’d had silicone injections. But no, her lips matched too perfectly the rest of Catherine’s face to be anything other than natural.
“Is our leader boring you to death with his Four Mysteries?” she asked, then, to take the sting out of her words, playfully jabbed Ma’s arm.
“Maybe you can do a better job,” Ma dared her back in the same spirit. “I was on the last two.”
Catherine let her eyes rest on David, took a breath, and said, “Since we’ve found remains here from nearly every culture, time period, and dynasty, Mystery Three is: Did each era and its relics influence subsequent cultures in the gorges? Which brings us to Mystery Four: What happened to the Ba civilization? We think it originated as far back as five thousand years ago. But who were the Ba and what happened to them? We want to find the answers before the dam is completed.”
It still didn’t seem terribly interesting to Hulan, but she noticed that David looked captivated. Perhaps it was the change in narrator.
“I don’t believe,” Stuart Miller said into the silence, “that you’re here for archaeology.” Hulan turned and saw him appraising her. “Why have you come to Site 518?”
“I’m investigating Brian McCarthy’s death,” she answered. “My husband has been hired to look into the theft of relics from this site.”
