‘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.
12
‘Will you be needing the car any more tonight, Herr Von Volker?’
‘Yes, Hans. Keep it ready.’ Von Volker strode past his liveried chauffeur and up the steps leading to his ancestral home.
Schloss Volker was a beautiful estate, built in the late 18th century by Erich Von Volker, Klaus’s ancestor.
Erich had built his empire on two fronts. First, through transatlantic shipping and slave trade in Africa, backed by profitable gold and diamond mining on the continent. On the second front, Erich Von Volker had maintained a private standing army of mercenaries that protected his assets and fought wars for hire. Some of them had even fought for the Americans during the Revolutionary War, while Erich sold the young army weapons. He’d solidified his holdings through political favors and power.
Things hadn’t changed much. Von Volker still maintained a few mining prospects in Africa, but the profits weren’t as good as in the past. Getting gold and blood diamonds out these days was extremely difficult. If he’d chosen to live in South Africa, he could have lived well.
But his heart was here, in Austria, his ancestral homeland. Also contained deep inside him was the burning desire of one day reuniting Austria with Germany to make a large country that would successfully stand against the Jew-loving nations of the world. Not only reuniting the two countries, but leading them into a glorious new age as well.
The estate grounds around the schloss were immaculately maintained. The grass was green, flowers bloomed every day, and the fountains ran pure water.
Many other men, lesser men, would have been satisfied with what he already possessed. Von Volker was not. He wanted to be the head of a unified Germany and Austria that he dreamed of every day; he would accept nothing less. And once he’d accomplished that, he would use the newly allied nation to lead the rest of the squabbling, disjointed European countries as well. Either they would fall in line from economic pressure the new power could bring to bear, or else there were other ways of gaining their allegiance …
He walked up the steps, where the houseman held the large, carved wooden door open for him. Alice was not there, and that mildly irritated Von Volker. If he hadn’t still been smarting from the casual disdain evidenced by Colonel Davari over dinner, he probably wouldn’t have thought twice about her absence. She tended to be interested in her own pursuits these days, but she hadn’t yet grown the guts to take a lover.