He stretched and yawned and scratched his scraggly beard.
“Let's get some sleep. In the morning we'll go after the sick slimy heart of the Duke of Ch'in,” said Master Li.
27. The Lake of the Dead
We left at dawn, and by the fourth day we reached the foothills. When we began to climb the mountains we left summer behind, and the green trees and fragrant flowers and rippling streams were replaced by the most depressing landscape that I had ever seen.
A strange chill gripped that mountainside. It was dead and stale, as though a monstrous iceberg had been scooped up and deposited upon a peak, where it had lain lifeless and unmelting for a thousand years. Sometimes we went for an hour without seeing a squirrel or hearing the song of a bird, and on the third day of the climb all signs of life vanished. We looked in vain for so much as an ant on the ground or an eagle in the sky.
We had been hearing the faint sound of falling water, and finally we reached the source. A meagre waterfall was trickling down the side of a chaotic cliff, and when we climbed to the top we saw that the cliff was part of a gigantic rock-slide that had blocked the narrow mouth of a valley many centuries ago. In the distance we could see another waterfall trickling down a higher cliff, and the entire valley in between had become a vast lake. It was the coldest, grayest, most unappetizing body of water that I had ever seen, and I knew in my bones that it was evil. Li Kao sat down and made some rapid calculations.
“Ox, this lake is the right size, the right shape, and at the correct angle,” he said. “This is what we saw that first burned silver and then burned gold, and it very much looks as though we'll have to find out what's on the bottom of it.”
It turned out to be more difficult than he expected. We made a raft and paddled to the center of the lake, but when we tried to reach bottom with a stone tied to a rope of vines we went down two hundred feet without touching anything. For practical purposes the lake had no bottom at all, and Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row. Finally he decided to climb the cliff at the other end of the lake and look at the problem from a different perspective.
It was a hard climb and very dangerous. The cliff was mostly shale that was held together by clay, and when we reached the top we found that the ground was soft and porous except for the path where the stream ran along a bed of solid rock. Master Li teetered at the cliffs edge and gazed down nearly five hundred feet to the gold-gray lake glinting dully in the sunlight.
“Why, it's a matter of elementary hydraulic engineering!” he exclaimed. “We can't reach bottom, so we'll bring the bottom up to us. The first order of business is to get hold of a lot of strong backs.”
We had to go a long way down the other side of the mountain before we reached a village, and the villagers wanted no part of a job that required getting close to that lake. They called it the Lake of the Dead, and swore that not even fish could live in the water.
“Once a year, at midnight on the fifth day of the fifth moon, a ghostly caravan approaches the Lake of the Dead,” an old woman said in a quavering whisper. “Once in my grandmother's time some foolish men crept out to spy upon that evil procession, and they were found with their bellies slit open and their guts ripped out! Since then we lock the doors in our village and hide beneath the beds on the fifth day of the fifth moon.”
Master Li glanced at me, and I knew what he was thinking. That should be the time when the Duke of Ch'in completed the final leg of his tax trip and started home again, and his route should pass the cold mountain and the Lake of the Dead.
It wasn't easy to persuade them, but we could offer more money than they could hope to earn in twenty lifetimes, and at last the men gathered picks and shovels and fearfully followed us back to the cliff. They worked like demons in order to get out of there as fast as possible. We began by digging a trench from the bank of the stream to a deep ravine, and then we ran connecting trenches to other ravines until we had a ditch that ran from one end of the cliff to the other. We felled trees and made a dam. It wasn't easy to persuade the stream to move to a new home, but eventually the water roared angrily from its bed of rock and began snarling through the porous earth at the bottoms of the ravines. We gave the men bonuses, but they barely paused to thank us before taking to their heels.
Master Li and I moved to the other side of the lake and pitched a tent. We had no idea how long it would take, and we passed the time by making divers’ equipment: air tanks from the bladders of wild pigs, and breathing tubes from the intestines. We fashioned bamboo spears, and made loops in our belts for the rocks that would give us extra weight. It happened far faster than either of us thought possible.
I was looking out across the smooth cold surface of the lake toward the cliff that was shimmering in the moonlight, and Li Kao was at a table writing down songs in the light of a lantern. Suddenly the lantern began to move. We stared in astonishment as it slid all the way down the table and crashed to the earthen floor, and then the floor started to buck beneath us like a wild horse. We ran from the tent and gazed at the cliff, and there was a rumbling, grinding sort of sound, and the cliff moved in the moonlight. Not even Master Li had expected something so spectacular, but the stream had tunneled so deeply into the spongy earth that almost half of the mountain leaned out, hovered in the air, and then plunged five hundred feet straight down into the Lake of the Dead.
We grabbed a tree and hung on for dear life. I saw a huge mass of water, silver in the moonlight, rise into the air like a cloud. The monstrous wave appeared to move very slowly toward the dam, and we felt a blast of icy wind, and then the wave plunged over the dam and smashed into the valley below. We saw a forest turned instantly to pulp, and we saw enormous boulders picked up and hurled through the air like grains of sand. The mountain beneath us shuddered, and huge rocks ground together and screamed deep in the bowels of the earth, and an icy mist closed around us. The tree that we were clinging to jerked and pitched and strained at its roots, and it seemed forever until the earth stopped bucking and the roar of water faded away.
The mist gradually dissolved, and we stared at an incredible sight. A forest of domes and spires and towers had lifted through the shallow water that remained, and my brain finally accepted the fact that the Lake of the Dead had been covering an entire city! Li Kao whooped with delight and grabbed my waist and began dancing around in a circle.
“What a lovely place to hide a heart!” he yelled. “Absolutely lovely!”
I danced with Master Li, but I could not agree that the place was lovely. The ghostly spires were reaching up to claw at the moon like the fingers of drowning men, and the water dripped from the turrets like tears.
The night passed, and the bright sun of morning that shone upon our little raft could warm us, but nothing could warm the water of the Lake of the Dead. I checked my pig bladders and breathing tubes, and the rocks in my belt and my spear.
“Ready?” asked Master Li.