Lourds laughed and took a small digital camera from his shirt pocket. ‘Your loss. These digital images will have to suffice.’ With a quick, practiced pull on the ropes, he righted himself and took pictures of the hole. It was wide enough that he could have thrust both arms in and had room left over. And it was at least four feet deep. There had been plenty of leverage for the ropes.
At the top of the cavern, Lourds looked down. He had that much of the puzzle figured out, but where had the rocks come from? Then, on the eastern wall, he saw a crack near the top.
When he climbed up to the top of the eastern wall, Lourds found the gap he’d spotted. It was only a few inches wide, nothing that would have been seen from the ground or by anyone not looking for it. Upon closer inspection, he found a seam that had been mortared into place. Cool air and the sound of rushing water sounded beyond.
A sandblaster couldn’t have peeled the smile from his face.
‘Wall is false.’ Gelu pounded on the section of the wall with his pickax.
The rock sounded empty.
‘Hollow on other side.’
Lourds turned in the climbing harness and shouted down to Rory. ‘If your cameraman has a stout heart, now would be the time to get him up here. Otherwise you’re going to miss that big reveal you’ve been waiting so impatiently for.’
When the cameraman was lashed securely in place to pitons, with a pair of Sherpas watching over him, Lourds and Gelu attacked the false rock with crowbars. Shamar had given his blessings to the endeavor.
‘Rock made good.’ Gelu growled as he shoved. ‘Put into place much good.’
Lourds silently agreed and leaned more heavily on his borrowed crowbar. The rock broke, and he had to find a new leverage place. In the end, though, the mortar gave way to the crowbars. Lourds and Gelu tried to hold on to the piece, but it was no use.
‘Look out!’
The carefully shaped section, eight feet wide and ten feet tall, toppled backwards and skidded down the twenty-foot slope. Thankfully, no one was standing that close, and the slab stopped well short of the first line of the scholar’s rocks.
Lourds took out his mini-Maglite and shined the beam into the dark recesses on the other side of the opening. Another cave wall gleamed dully forty feet away. He climbed over to the opening and stood peering down into the darkness.
He couldn’t estimate the distance for certain, but he guessed that somewhere around a hundred feet below was a rushing stream cutting its way through the guts of the mountain. Cold air seeped into the cavern from the closed-off area.
‘The monks are going to hate us for all the draft we’ve brought into their homes.’ As Lourds stood there, the beam reflecting off the water, he thought he saw another opening near the bottom. ‘I need a flare.’
Gelu called out to one of his men, and an emergency flare was tossed up.
Lourds grabbed it, banged the end to set it off, then tossed it into the abyss. He counted the seconds of the fall as the brightly burning red star fell into the crevice, then into the water. A hundred feet was about right.
And there was another opening at the bottom near the waterline.
After the river carried the flare’s light away, Lourds turned to Gelu. ‘Can you get us down there?’
The Sherpa nodded. ‘Sure. No problem. Is what we do.’
True to Gelu’s word, the Sherpas quickly hammered in pitons and laid climbing ropes down the rock face.
Bundled up in cold-weather clothing again, Lourds rappelled down into the crevice. The BBC crew was more than a little put out that filming the discovery had gotten so difficult. To make matters worse, they’d had to stop filming except in bits and pieces to save the batteries.
Four of Rory’s crew worked on the hand generators to power up the batteries. They looked like mad monkey dervishes as they kept winding and handing the units back and forth as they took breaks. The monks joined in, but the effort required a lot to produce a little.
Using a spotter light on his forehead, Lourds descended into the darkness. Except for the rushing water, everything was still. The rope sang through his gloves and the D-ring on his climbing harness. He caught himself on his feet, then pushed off and shot down at a controlled speed again.
He was on the cavern near the bottom of the crevice before he knew it. He overshot the wall and ended up sliding out of control into the cavern. His head whipped about, and he couldn’t tell what he’d gotten himself into.
‘Thomas!’ Gelu bellowed behind him.
Half-in and half-out of the cavern, holding on with one hand on the rope and the other on the cavern mouth, Lourds yanked his head up and focused on his predicament. Fear gave way to astonishment as he peered inside the chamber.
‘Thomas!’
‘I’m here. I’m fine.’ Lourds spoke more quietly to himself. ‘My God, I’m fine.’ He dug in his boots and climbed up into the cave as Gelu slid down beside him and perched expertly on the chamber lip.
The Sherpa grinned. ‘Thought you lost.’
‘Me too.’
‘Water maybe bad. Take underground.’
‘Yeah, you’re probably right about that.’ In the cave, Lourds pulled a flare from his backpack, banged it on the nearest stone wall, and held the blazing tube aloft.
Around him, the final resting place of several dozen Jiahu immigrants lay undisturbed. Desiccated remains lay in hollowed shelves in the walls.
Gelu stood at Lourds’s side and gazed around in wonder. ‘Not monks.’
‘No, definitely not monks.’
The monks practiced sky burial, laying the bodies of the dead out in the wild for carrion birds and ground predators to take.
Slowly, Lourds walked forward. Tortoiseshells lay at the head of each body, and there were dozens of them in the tomb. Picking up one, he examined it in the spotter light. Nine symbols had been etched into the plastron.
Lourds only recognized two of them from the sixteen that scholars had found while digging at Jiahu. Not only that, beside the next body lay a delicate bone flute about eight inches long and half an inch in diameter.
The instrument alone was enough to make a career.
Hu handled the bone flute with reverence. So far it was the only one they had found. ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you, Thomas?’
‘What we’ve done, you mean?’ Lourds smiled and looked at the chamber and at Gloria Chen organizing a quick cataloguing effort of the find. ‘Yes, I know what we’ve done. Opened up a whole new field of study for people involved in the Jiahu dig.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if those people are going to love us or hate us. We’ve increased their workload considerably.’
‘As long as they get additional funding to support their efforts, they’ll love us.’ The older man’s hazel eyes gleamed with joy. ‘You also realize we’ll have to prepare a paper on this discovery soon.’
‘I do. And we will.’ Lourds yawned tiredly. Staying up half the night was wearing on him after the day he’d had. But he wouldn’t have traded any of the experiences for anything.
Rory and the BBC crew had a very small area they could rove in, and they weren’t happy about it, but the monks and the Sherpas enforced the restricted space.
‘Seriously, Professor Lourds, we should be getting all of this on camera.’ Rory fumed, but didn’t try to bypass the Sherpas or the monks. ‘We should be involved with aspects of this story. If it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t be here now.’
Lourds turned to the man. ‘Rory, I like you. You’re a good guy. You know your stuff when it comes to what you do. But this is what I do, and I know better than to let an amateur walk through what we have here. What we’ve found here is important. Maybe it seems like what someone found in an attic to you, but these are the kinds of finds that can teach the world a lot about how people lived thousands of years ago. Believe it or not, all those decisions all those years ago still have an impact on how we define ourselves as people.’