“Noble Sirs, there are women who can see right into the heart of a man, and I would like you to know that Lotus Cloud never accepted the love of Miser Shen. She accepted the love of a poor peasant who loved his little girl too much, and who went insane.”
18. The Hand of Hell
We traveled at night, and spent the days huddled in the tent while we fried in the heat. When we peeped through the folds we saw multiple images of the sun reflected in the glaring white salt, surrounded by orange and violet halos that spun round and round and made us sick to our stomachs. Whirlwinds danced in mad patterns, and the wind howled horribly. Even at night the heat never released us from its blazing fingers, and often the moon and stars were obscured by flying salt. The faint trace of what we hoped was a road ran on and on, seemingly without end, and it was a relief when the mirages began, because they gave us something to look at.
I would see a castle with a silver dome, standing in the center of an emerald lake. “No, no!” Miser Shen would say. “It is a large rock in the middle of a river, and the rock is covered with nesting birds. Seagulls, I think, although I cannot imagine what seagulls are doing in a desert.” Master Li would snort and say, “Nonsense. I can clearly see a large pleasure barge floating in a pond, and the banks are lined with bright green trees.”
Then the mirage would dissolve into nothingness, and we would gaze at an endless expanse of white salt.
We saw cities and cemeteries and armies arrayed in battle formation, and always there was water and a green oasis of some sort. As the days passed we had to ration water, and thirst began to torment us. Then one day Miser Shen pointed ahead.
“Look at that ghastly mirage!” he exclaimed.
“Mirage?” I said. “Shen, it's the nightmare of a demented baboon.”
Li Kao studied the shimmering image carefully and said, “Tell me what you see.”
“Well, I see the usual green oasis, but it is standing in the middle of a mess of shattered stones,” said Miser Shen. “Geysers of steam are hissing up from the bowels of the earth, and I smell a horrible stench of sulphur.”
“The whole mirage is surrounded by a broad belt like a moat, and it's filled with a strange fiery liquid that makes a sickening sort of bubbling sound,” I said.
“My friends, I regret to report that I see precisely the same thing,” Master Li said grimly. “That is not a mirage, and the path we are following leads straight to it.”
As we came closer we realized that we were looking at the ruins of a once great city, but what a terrible catastrophe had befallen it! The walls were tumbled ruins. One narrow span of what had once been a mighty stone bridge still crossed a moat that had formerly held blue water and white swans and golden fish, and now bubbled with fiery red-black lava. On the other side a pair of enormous bronze gates stood open, but bent and twisted by some unimaginable force, and when we nervously crossed the moat and passed through the gates a terrible sight met our eyes. Steam hissed like the breath of angry dragons through great gaping holes in the earth, and pools of murderous lava heaved and bubbled, and it seemed to me that the harsh wind that howled through the ruins was wailing death, death, death. A lunatic tangle of side streets branched from both sides of a central avenue—if one could call them streets, since not one building remained standing—and in the distance we saw a great mass of tumbled stones. It had probably been the palace of the king, and we decided to climb to the top of it to try to find the green oasis that we had glimpsed from a distance.
It had certainly been a palace. We climbed over smashed statues and beautiful stone friezes, and then we stopped dead in our tracks and stared. Ahead of us was a wall about thirty feet high and perhaps five times as long, and the three of us had the same thought at once.
“That wall could not possibly have survived the catastrophe!” I cried. “It must have been built afterward, from the toppled stones.”
“I would not like to meet whatever it was that knocked a hole in it,” Master Li said thoughtfully.
Nor would I. Some incredible force had jerked out enormous stone slabs and tossed them aside like pebbles. A great gaping hole confronted us like a screaming mouth, and when we cautiously stepped through it we stared at great piles of human bones. Miser Shen turned quite pale.
“I swear that those poor souls were chewed!” he gasped.
He was right. Nothing but monstrous grinding teeth could have shredded bones like that, and not only bones. Armor had been pulverized as well, and Miser Shen and I were greatly relieved when Li Kao examined it with critical eyes and said:
“This armor is in the style of five hundred years ago, or more. Perhaps a thousand years would be closer. Whatever the creature was, it has been dust for centuries.”
He bent over and examined the mangled skeletons.
“You know, I recall a monster that could have done this to armed warriors,” he said thoughtfully. “It was discovered frozen in the ice of a Mongolian glacier. Half mammal, half lizard, one hundred feet from head to tail, and equipped with teeth like steel doorposts. The sages wanted to preserve it for scientific study, but we had an exceptionally idiotic emperor at the time, and I regret to say that the imperial dolt had the beast cut up and boiled for a state banquet. The fact that it smelled like two thousand old unopened rooms and tasted like diseased whale blubber didn't bother the Son of Heaven one bit. He happily awarded himself the medal ‘Heroic Slayer of Inedible Monstrosities,’ which he wore on all state occasions.”
I was staring at a large toppled slab.
“Master Li, I think this is covered with writing, but the script is so ancient that I can't make any sense of it,” I said.
He examined the slab with interest, and brushed a layer of salt from it. Time and the wind had made much of the writing illegible, but enough remained to make my hair stand up on my head.
“It begins with a prayer to the gods,” he said. “Then some words are missing, and then it says: ‘… punished for our sins, and the earth opened with a great roar and flames engulfed us. Fiery black rock sprayed up like water, and for eight days the earth heaved and shuddered, and on the ninth day the earth vomited forth the Hand That No One Sees, from the very depths of Hell.’ ”
“The what?” Miser Shen asked.
“The Hand That No One Sees, but don't ask me what it means,” said Master Li. “More words are missing, and then it says: ‘… sixth day of our doom, and we labor on the wall but we are faint of heart. We pray and sacrifice, but the gods remain implacable. The queen and her ladies have chosen the more merciful death, and have jumped into the lake of fiery molten rock. We did not try to stop them. The Hand moves closer. Our spears are hurled at nothingness and bounce away from nothingness. The wall is beginning to shake. The Hand…’ ”
Li Kao straightened up. “That's all there is,” he said quietly.
“Whoof!” Miser Shen gasped. “I don't care how many centuries ago that happened. I want to get out of here.”