expeditions in these parts in search of petty bribes.
“How long have we got till they get here?” Wizard asked.
“An hour, maybe less. I think it would be wise for us to be gone by the time they arrive.”
“I agree, my old friend,” Wizard said. “We’d better hurry. Get down here and bring some more lights. Tell Chow to fire up his computer: I’m going to get started recording images and transmitting them up to him.”
THE UNDERGROUNDchamber in which Wizard found himself was situated in the Three Gorges region of China, in an area that very much suited him.
This was because the Chinese characterwu means “wizard” or “witch” depending on the context—and it was used often in the names of the area’s features: Wu Gorge, the second of the famous Three Gorges; Wushan, the ancient walled fortress-town that once sat on the banks of the Yangtze; and of course Mount Wushan, the colossal two-mile-high peak that towered above Wizard’s chamber.
Translation: Witch Mountain.
The Wu Gorge area was renowned for its history—shrines, temples, carvings like the Kong Ming Tablet, and rock-cut caves like the Green Stone Cavern—nearly all of which had now been submerged beneath the waters of the 350-mile-long lake that had formed behind the gargantuan walls of the Three Gorges Dam.
The area was also known, however, for certain unusual events.
The Roswell of China, for hundreds of years it had been the site of numerous strange sightings: unexplained celestial phenomena, swarms of shooting stars, and aurora-like apparitions. It was even claimed that on one gruesome day in the seventeenth century the clouds over Wushan had rained blood.
The Wu Gorge area certainly had a history.
But now in the twenty-first century, that history had been drowned in the name of progress, swallowed by the waters of the Yangtze as the great river backed up against the largest structure ever built by mankind. The Old Town of Wushan now lay three hundred feet beneath the waves.
Fast-flowing tributaries that had once gushed into the Yangtze via spectacular side gorges had also been humbled by the expanding Dam Lake—what had once been dramatic four-hundred-foot-high whitewater ravines were now just regular hundred-foot-high gorges with placid water at their bases.
Small stone villages that had once sat on the banks of these little rivers, already far removed from the outside world, had now disappeared completely from history.
But not from Wizard.
In one partially flooded gorge, deep within the mountains to the north of the Yangtze, he had found an isolated mountain hamlet built on higher ground and in it, the entrance to this cave system.
The hamlet was primitive and ancient, a few huts constructed of irregular stones and tilting thatch roofs. It had been abandoned three hundred years ago and the locals thought it haunted.
Now, thanks to the ultramodern dam a hundred miles away, the deserted hamlet was flooded to knee- height.
The entrance to the cave system had been neither guarded by booby traps nor heralded by elaborate gates. It was, rather, its very ordinariness that had kept it secret for over two millennia.
Wizard had found the entrance inside a small stone hut that backed onto the base of the mountain. Once inhabited by the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi—the inventor of Taoism and the teacher of Confucius—this unassuming little hut possessed within it a stone well with a raised brick rim.
And at the bottom of that well, concealed beneath a layer of foul black water, was a false floor—and underneath that false floor, had been this magnificent chamber.
Wizard got to work.
He pulled a powerful Asus laptop from his backpack and connected it to a high-res digital camera and started clicking away, taking shots of the chamber’s walls.
As the camera gathered its images, a rapid-fire series of computations took place on Wizard’s computer screen.
At work was a translation program—a complex database that had taken Wizard years to compile. It featured thousands of ancient symbols, from many countries and cultures, and their accepted translations. It could also perform “fuzzy” translations, a kind of best guess when a symbol’s meaning was ambiguous.
Every time a symbol was captured on the digital camera, it was scanned by the computer and a translation found. For example:
ELEMENT TRANSLATIONS: shi tou(stone) si (temple)
FULL SEQUENCE TRANS:“The Temple of Stone”
FUZZ TRANS POSSIBILITIES:“Stone shrine,” “Stone Temple of the Dark Sun,” “Stonehenge (Match Ref. ER:46–2B)”
Among the other glyphs and reliefs on the walls, the computer found Laozi’s most famous philosophical invention, the Taijitu:
The computer translated: “Taijitu; Ref:Tao Te Ching. Western colloq. ref: ‘Yin-Yang.’ Common symbol for the duality of all things: opposites possess small traits of each other: e.g., in the good there is some evil, and in the evil there is some good.”
On other occasions, the computer found no prior record of a symbol:
In these cases it created a new file and added it to the database, so that if the symbol in question was ever found again, the database would have a record of it.
Either way, Wizard’s computer whirred, absorbing the images hungrily.
