The Temple Mount Code

11

From the interview chamber, Lourds followed Shamar and Ang down a twisting passageway into the mountain. Lourds took a mini-Maglite from his backpack to add to the glow given of Ang’s lantern. As the cold from the mountain surrounded him, he regretted leaving his coat behind. He’d assumed that since the monks hadn’t bundled up, where they were going wouldn’t be cold.

Hu slapped at his upper arms. ‘Nothing like a brisk walk, eh?’ His breath puffed out in small white clouds. ‘Especially after the long trek up a mountainside.’

‘I could have done with some more heat. And I honestly thought we were going to bed soon.’ Lourds yawned and shined his light around. There were no tool marks on the wall, which meant the passageway was natural. ‘I have to admit, I’m looking forward to sleeping in a warm bed.’

‘So am I.’

They continued down for several more minutes before the passageway widened into another cavern. When Lourds entered the new room, he saw dozens of scholar’s rocks standing before him. They looked like a massive chess game set out to be played.

Stunned, he wandered among them, drawn by the enigma they presented. Nearly all of them were taller than he was and weighed several hundred pounds. He ran his fingers along many, discovering the same smooth texture.

Amazed, he turned back to Shamar, careful to keep the bright light out of the old monk’s eyes. ‘How many are there?’

‘One hundred sixteen.’ Shemar stood with his arms in the sleeves of his robe.

‘Why are they here?’

‘No one knows. This is one of the things the monks that arrive here for training are told to contemplate. We are still awaiting an answer.’

Overwhelmed, Lourds walked through the forest of stone figures. Many looked like people, the rudimentary shapes showing men, women, and children. He touched oval faces that held only the hint of features, eyes, nose, and mouth. Ears were conspicuously absent. The majority of the outer ring of statues depicted common people.

‘This is a farmer. See his hoe?’ Lourds traced the image of the hoe in bas-relief along the rock.

‘All I see is a rock.’ Rory stood on the other side of the large stone.

‘That is because you choose to see with only your eyes.’ Shamar’s voice echoed over the chamber, and Lourds knew the old man had chosen his spot because the acoustics in the cavern allowed him to be heard like that. Upon further inspection, Lourds saw the small platform cut from the stone floor. The area had been clearly marked.

‘Who chose that spot?’ Lourds pointed his flashlight beam over the low rise.

‘The speaker’s post was already inscribed when we got here.’

‘Look! I found a pig!’ Over to the left, Thompson pointed excitedly.

The lump of rock was definitely piggish in shape, with a snout and huge hindquarters.

‘Here’s a tortoise!’ Gloria Chen strode through the figures and laid her hand on a low figure that was unmistakably that.

Lourds made his way to her, thinking that perhaps the tortoise would offer a clue as the other one had in Jiahu. The scholar’s rock did indeed look like a tortoise, but instead of having a high, rounded back, it had a flat one. Still, the head, feet, and tail were all in the appropriate places. The creature even seemed to be smiling.

He got down on one knee and played his flashlight beam on the tortoise’s underside. Gloria joined him, adding her beam to his. He hardly noticed the cold, even though every breath they breathed plumed out white. Her glasses were slightly fogged.

‘You think there’s another clue here, don’t you?’ Gloria didn’t act angry now, but she seemed determined to find whatever might be there first.

Lourds smiled. Competition was something he knew all about. He flicked his light back and forth.

Unfortunately, nothing appeared to be there.

‘Maybe something’s hidden inside. Maybe there’s a hidden space.’ Gloria crawled under the massive tortoise and started pushing at the rock.

‘You’ll want to be careful under there. This thing has got to weigh a ton at least.’

‘I got here first. If anything’s here to be found, I’m going to find it.’ Gloria shoved herself farther under the tortoise while on her back.

Lourds flattened himself as well and played his light over the tortoise. ‘It would be poetic symmetry if this tortoise did, in fact, yield another clue, but the likelihood of that is small.’

‘You’re just trying to get me out of here, aren’t you?’

‘No, but I don’t think this tortoise is going to tell us anything.’ Lourds shoved himself out from under the tortoise and started to look around.

‘This is a woman.’ Professor Hu flashed his beam over a smaller figure with a thin woman’s gentle curves a few rocks over.

‘She’s carrying a fan.’ Hu flicked his beam down the rock’s side and revealed the familiar fan shape in the woman’s hands.

‘A fan?’ Rory walked through the figures to join them.

‘A winnowing fan.’ Lourds touched the stone fan and felt its sharp edges. ‘The Peligang people, who lived in Jiahu along the Yellow River in 7000 BC, raised foxtail millet and rice to eat. After the millet was harvested and threshed, the grain was separated from the chaff by tossing it into the air. The wind blew the chaff away while the grain fell back into the fan.’

‘Uh, Professor Lourds.’

Lourds looked up at the BBC reporter.

‘I’m going to need you to repeat that in front of the camera.’ Rory waved the cameraman over.

Sighing, Lourds shook his head.

‘Look, whenever you feel like you’re going to pontificate or go on about something, maybe you could give me a sign. It would save us both a lot of time and effort.’

Hu chuckled. ‘Unfortunately, a professor is at the mercy of his own knowledge and interests. Poor Thomas never knows when he’s going to launch into a presentation till he finds himself in the middle of it.’

‘Rory.’ Lourds clapped the young reporter on the shoulder. ‘You’re going to need to be a little more responsible for getting your material. I’m not going to stop at every moment and repeat myself. Take notes. When you get a spare moment, research things. Learn things. Trust me, you’ll be much better at your job. Everyone needs an education, and most people never realize how responsible they are for their own edification. Do you understand?’

‘Completely.’

‘Good.’ Lourds started to walk away.

‘However, could you do the fan thing again?’

Deeper into the maze of scholar’s rocks, the sculptures — and Lourds couldn’t help thinking of them that way because so many of the figures couldn’t have merely been found — changed significantly. The difference was immediate and disturbing.

‘These men are armed.’ Hu seemed rattled by the discovery as well.

Lourds played his beam over a large man carrying what looked like a stone axe, with a short haft jutting up from the man’s big fist, and an oblong rock at the end.

‘Those people living at Jiahu were peaceful, Thomas. We’ve found no evidence of wars among the bodies we’ve disinterred.’

‘Only a little over three hundred graves have been opened. There may be surprises awaiting archaeologists. The big question is why these people, if they’re indeed the same people who left the tortoise in the grave, traveled this far from their home.’ Lourds moved to the next warrior figure, a man with a club held in both hands over his head.

‘The flood could have done it. From all indications, the original settlement was surrounded by a moat they doubtless used to irrigate the millet and rice. But the Yellow River — China’s Pride and China’s Sorrow, in equal parts — has a habit of changing its course. During one of those changes, it flooded Jiahu.’

Lourds knew the process. Loess, formed of wind-borne erosion, filled the river with silt, sand, and clay that became naturally occurring dams solidified by calcium carbonate. The changes took hundreds and even thousands of years, but they occurred. The Yellow River, because of its elevated riverbed, was especially problematic.

‘So did these warriors attack these people and cause them to migrate?’ Lourds shined his beam into the nightmarish face of the club-wielding attacker. Less attention had been paid to the man’s features, and he looked like a cipher. ‘Or did these people attack the immigrants on their way to this place?’

‘This cavern tells a story.’ Lourds stood beside Shamar and looked out over the chamber.

The old monk smiled. ‘Yes, we believe so, too.’

‘The people who founded this place were desperate.’ Lourds pointed his light at figures that seemed to cower from the approaching warriors. ‘They’d lost their homes and were searching for another.’

He was slightly distracted by Rory’s cameraman aiming the bright light in his face, but he persevered. The footage with the cave all around him would look terrific in the documentary. He’d chosen to stand on the speaking area, so his practiced voice thundered inside the cavern.

‘But they couldn’t live here. Not without a food source.’ Lourds looked out over the scholar’s rocks and contemplated the problem. ‘Then why choose to live here if it was such a hardship?’

He answered his own question. ‘Because they wanted to leave a message and tell their story.’ Lourds was convinced that was the truth. ‘Cultures want to leave something of themselves behind. Remember, these people had to have known the Yellow River overflowed their countryside. Look at the side of the cave.’

The cameraman swung around to survey the cavern walls. Hu had been the first to find the tool markings on the wall. Once they’d seen the first ones, the others had been found in quick order.

‘These people inscribed the river on the walls. Those are river currents.’ Lourds felt certain the wavy lines could be nothing else. ‘The river, Mother River, had been important to their community, until she turned vicious and swallowed their homes.’ He took a dramatic breath, the way he did sometimes to cement an idea in one of his classes. ‘Then they came here to leave their story.’

‘But what happened to them after that?’ Rory stood at the forefront of the crowd.

Lourds shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Getting food here would have been hard. Enough to feed a large group, and I’m certain this was a large community, probably more than a hundred people, would have been even harder. They would have had to haul it in, or trade for it with the Sherpa or other people who traversed the mountains.’

‘Why not go somewhere else? Somewhere easier?’

‘All the arable lands, the lands where a people could live with relative comfort and assurance of a crop, would have been already inhabited around these mountains.’ Suddenly Lourds realized something else. ‘They knew they were dying. They knew their culture was going to be erased as surely as the Yellow River had erased their homeland.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Either they would die out from disease or a low birth rate, or they would be assimilated by stronger, more successful cultures.’

Rory focused on Lourds. ‘How long did it take for those people to make all these statues?’

‘Scholar’s rocks, not statues. And the answer to that is decades. Generations.’

‘They spent all that time looking for rocks that looked like people? Then hauled them to this cave? That sounds like a lot of work.’

‘I’m sure it was, but one thing the Himalayas has besides a lot of snow is a lot of rocks.’

Everyone laughed.

But even as he said that, Lourds knew that wasn’t the true answer. It was a possible answer — but not the correct one.