“My dear friends,” said the prince with an enchanting smile. “My dear, dear friends, I beseech you to plant gourds. Lots and lots of gourds.”
Then he broke into an irresistible little dance step, while he chanted, “Lots and lots and lots and lots, lots and lots and lots and lots… of gourds!”
Well, a prince is entitled to a few peculiarities. The peasants planted lots and lots of gourds, and the question was where Prince Liu Sheng was going to find the pigs to eat them.
As it turned out, he didn't want the gourds for the meat. The dried seeds of the calabash have the peculiar property of burning for a very long time and shedding a brilliant white light, and the prince had brought in experts who had discovered a substantial deposit of salt beneath the marsh at the west end of the valley. By placing calabash seeds inside rhinoceros horn lanterns, Prince Liu Sheng was able to establish the world's first twenty-four-hour-a-day salt mine.
The peasants were chained to enormous horizontal wheels. Overseers whipped them around in circles as they powered drills that bored more than a thousand feet into the soft soil. Bamboo casing was installed, and ropes and windlasses replaced the drills, and buckets lifted the brine to a pipeline that ran clear across the valley to a large patch of shale at the east side. An odorless gas seeped up through the cracks, and it was easily ignited. The brine was dumped upon iron plates and heated, and the salt was extracted and carried away to market. Day and night the whips lashed the peasants around in circles, while Prince Liu Sheng rode through the works on a silken litter with a merry quip and friendly wave for one and all.
Eventually the salt gave out, but the prince had also discovered a narrow but rich vein of iron ore. The male peasants were chained into work gangs that dug endless tunnels, and the female peasants remained chained to the wheels. Now they powered huge bellows at blast furnaces, and in no time at all the Iron Works of Prince Liu Sheng was the talk of the empire. That was when he became known as the Laughing Prince. His sense of humor almost finished him, because he nearly guffawed himself to death as he watched the comical capers of the ladies at the wheel. Their chains were red hot, you see, and for a time “The Dance of the Peasants of Prince Liu” was all the rage at court.
The Laughing Prince called upon his scientific genius, and somehow devised a treatment of acids and other agents that made his iron less brittle than any other. The acid plant was on top of the eastern hills, and the waste trickled down in a steaming path that circled almost the entire bowl of the valley, and sages and scholars gathered to observe the astonishing effect when the waste reached the marsh. The water turned bright yellow. By day it steamed and bubbled, and at night it emitted an eerie violet light, and fish and frogs floated on their backs with horrified dead eyes lifted to the billowing black clouds from the ironworks. By then the trees were all dead, and no birds sang, and the Laughing Prince made some marvelous jokes about the smell. There were some who protested, but protests ceased when the prince opened the books. The profits were enormous.
Then something happened which nobody fully understands to this day. Prince Liu Sheng abruptly lost interest in making money. He returned to his first love, and he had his field of science picked out. He was going to revolutionize medicine.
“I shall strip the veils of ignorance from the healing art, and display the very nerves and tissues!” he proclaimed.
The assembled sages and scholars were appalled when the prince explained some of his proposed experiments, but their protests abruptly ceased when he pointed out that he would need lots and lots of subjects. “Lots and lots and lots and lots,” he chanted, breaking into his little dance step, “lots and lots and lots and lots… of subjects!” The sages and scholars danced right along with him.
Close to his estate was a grotto. He transformed it into his Medical Research Center, and sages who came to observe the experiments either applauded and praised—and then staggered outside to vomit—or protested, and became subjects for the next experiments. Nobody argued about the prince's expertise. Unquestionably he was the world's greatest expert on the effects of stretching, compressing, slicing, dousing in acids, burning, breaking, twisting—seldom if ever has the human body been so carefully studied. People who enjoy such pastimes need never be lonely. The Laughing Prince gathered like-minded fellows around him. He called them his Monks of Mirth, and he dressed them in robes made from clown's motley, and they danced and laughed beneath the moon as they capered through the valley with a brigade of soldiers to gather peasants for more experiments.
The Laughing Prince was hopelessly, homicidally mad. Some say that his imperial brother finally had enough and sent the yellow scarf, which is the imperial command to commit suicide. Others deny it. At any rate, the prince fell ill. He tossed and turned in a delirium of fever, screaming and swearing, and in his lucid moments he gazed out the window at the ruins of the valley and swore to return from the grave to finish the job.
He died. He was placed in his tomb.
“Seven hundred and fifty years later, capering monks in motley have been seen in the Valley of Sorrows,” Master Li said. “Brother Squint-Eyes has been murdered, and it appears that part of the valley has been destroyed in a way that is worthy of the Laughing Prince.”
“Whoof,” I said.
“Whoof indeed, although in such cases the poetic promise almost always turns out to be pathetically prosaic,” Master Li said, rather sadly. “Let's go see what the body of Brother Squint-Eyes can tell us.”
The monastery was very old, and quite large for such a small valley. The abbot had his monks lined up like an honor guard, and he was disappointed when Master Li declined a tour of inspection. Master Li also declined to begin with the scene of the crime, stating that it was unwise to come to a corpse with one's mind crammed with preconceptions, and we were led down a long winding flight of steps to the lowest basement and the cold room.
Lanterns were hung all over. The room was very bright, which meant that the shadows were very dark, and the play of light and shadow over the body on the block of ice highlighted the head. I stopped short and caught my breath. Never in my life had I seen such terror on a human face. The bulging eyes and gaping mouth were permanently fixed in the expression of one whose last view has been of the most horrible pit in Hell.
Master Li said that the expression was interesting, in that three or four drugs could have caused it, but none of them was common to China. He rolled up his sleeves and opened his case, and the blades glinted like icicles in the cold musty chamber. The abbot appeared to be on the verge of fainting, as did his four assistants, who hovered on the staircase. I myself will never get used to it, and I had to force my eyes to watch. The minutes passed like molasses dripping in winter. After ten minutes Master Li straightened up, and the murderous expression on his face was not entirely a trick of shadows.
“Bat shit,” he said.
He bent back over the cadaver, and his knives moved angrily.
“No yak manure, no volcanic ash, no nuns’ pigtails, and no Tsao Tsao,” he muttered. “Nothing but another corpse.”
He went back to work, and various pieces of Brother Squint-Eyes landed on the ice beside the body.
“Our departed friend was recently in a large city,” Master Li said matter-of-factly. “His death occurred not more than four hours after his return.”