'Connection?' Jenkins asked, as if he didn't understand. But then he winced and his eyes drifted downward. 'It's my job,' he said in a voice that sounded suddenly weary, and Shan knew the American manager understood his question perfectly. 'I heard that sound,' Jenkins added, almost in a whisper. 'It was like a heartbeat.' He looked up at Winslow. 'You heard it, too, right?'
They sat in silence for what seemed a long time.
'There are two people outside your camp,' Shan said, 'working on their knees in the earth.'
Jenkins snorted and grinned at Shan, as though grateful for the change in subject. 'One of the development banks is providing some big dollars for the project. Which means volumes of rules and criteria that have been dreamed up by bureaucrats. One is that we do an archaeological assessment. Someone kicked up an artifact and made the mistake of telling Golmud. Next thing we know two experts arrive with a letter saying we have to cooperate. They will catalog the site, write a report, and move on. Just more red tape.'
'What kind of artifact?' Shan asked.
'An old piece of bronze with writing on it. Kind of thing any Tibetan farmer turns up twice a day.' As he spoke his secretary appeared with a single sheet of paper with a short list of names. She looked at each of the three men in turn, and handed the paper to Winslow. Then she turned to Jenkins. 'Don't tell that Zhu,' she said and hurried away.
Jenkins took another puff and looked after the woman with worry in his eyes.
'If Public Security is here, why would you need the army too?' Winslow asked offhandedly.
'PLA often helps with relocations,' Jenkins grunted. 'They say it is good training for the soldiers.'
A shiver ran down Shan's spine. Training for the soldiers. It was one thing the army did better than anyone else in Tibet. Relocate Tibetans. Rip apart the roots people had to their land, and to each other. Proclaim people to be refugees and move them to make room for soldiers or Han immigrants. Tibetans seldom complained. They remembered that the army had once relocated them with cannons and aerial bombs.
'You mean moving towns?'
'Sometimes. I heard about some village up in the mountains. Damned shame. No one said destroy it. Some hot dog in a tank started shooting it from half a mile away. Said he thought it was abandoned, said his crews practice that way.'
'Practice?' Winslow snapped. 'You mean find an old Tibetan building and blow it up?'
Jenkins inhaled on his cigar and studied Winslow closely, but made no reply.
A phone rang, with a sound more like a buzzer than a ring. A radio telephone, the manager had said. Jenkins's secretary called out his name. Jenkins stood and shrugged. 'The venture will compensate,' he said, and stepped out of the room.
Shan leapt to the metal table and lifted the top half of the newspaper stack.
'We have to go,' Winslow said nervously.
Shan nodded, pulled out the paper dated the week after the stone eye was stolen, folded it, placed it inside his shirt, and returned the stack to the shelf.
As they approached the cleared patch of earth five minutes later the two figures in aprons kept at their work, one now lifting a plastic bucket to fill a round tray with dirt as the second slowly shook the tray. The dirt sifted out the bottom of the tray in fine grains, until there was a small mound under it. Then the man with the bucket shuffled back to the cleared patch and began refilling the bucket. He had nearly completed the task when he looked up and acknowledged Shan and Winslow. He was a Chinese, in his sixties, with thick black-rimmed spectacles and long thick snow-white hair under a broad-rimmed hat. His apron, apparently tailored for the task, had four rows of small pockets. From his belt hung a small nylon pouch, and a holster bearing a small hammer and two thick brushes. He cast what looked like a grimace toward them and returned to the bucket.
Shan wandered to the far side of the patch, where the man's assistant waited with the soil sieve beside what looked like a pile of coats. She was also Chinese, much younger, with very short hair, wearing a tee shirt that said, in English, Bones Are Us.
'Some Tibetans,' Shan observed quietly, 'think there are things buried in the earth that, once discovered, have the power to change the world.'
The young woman cocked her head at him. 'Mostly,' she replied after studying him for a moment, 'the things we find have the power to make your back ache and your hands blister.' She accepted another bucket of earth, bending over the sieve with a business-like manner. A blue pottery shard appeared, which the man lifted and inserted into one of his pockets.
'The manager says you found something with writing,' Winslow said.
The man looked up in surprise. 'Your Mandarin is very good. Most of the foreigners don't even try.'
'If you asked,' Shan suggested, 'some of the villagers might help you. It is a lot of work for only the two of you.'
The man looked at Shan with the same curiosity the woman had shown. 'They don't like us digging in their valley. The first day we opened the ground, they drove some of their animals over our dig.'
'Surely not on purpose,' Shan said in surprise. It didn't seem possible that the peaceful villagers of Yapchi would try to damage the professor's work.
The man shrugged. 'No one is too welcoming.' He lowered the bucket. 'I am sorry. I thought you were more of the oil workers. They come and make fun of us sometimes, say we seem to be taking a long time to plant our garden. Or how they could move this dirt out in five minutes, when it takes us five days.'
'But you don't work for the venture?'
The elderly Han shook his head. 'Our university has a contract with the development bank. The cost will be deducted from the funds advanced to the venture. It is how the banks make sure the proper study is conducted before production ruins the site.' He removed his hat and wiped his brow. 'I am Professor Ma from Chengdu. This is my assistant Miss Ming.'
As Shan and Winslow introduced themselves the professor stepped to the pile of coats and lifted them, revealing a wooden box that had the appearance of an old tool chest. He inserted a key in the padlock that held the box shut, opened it, and extended an object wrapped in black felt toward Shan. It was a heavy piece of bronze, two inches wide, slightly curved, with two rows of writing. The top row was Tibetan script, the bottom Chinese ideograms. Both scripts were heavily ornate, the Tibetan in the special ornate form traditionally used for recording scriptures and sutras. The fragments gave little sense of the original message. Until the communist government had abandoned the tradition fifty years before, Chinese ideograms had been written vertically, from top to bottom, so that the few Chinese characters that appeared on the bronze shard were not connected in meaning. The first character was lao, the word for old. The second said yu. Jade. The third, broken at the center, was impossible to identify. The ornate Tibetan script eluded him. He thought he saw the word treasure, but could not be certain.
'A samkang,' Shan suggested. The bronze shard could have come from a large bronze temple burner.
The professor nodded. 'As good a guess as any.'
Shan tried to visualize a little Tibetan temple at the head of the valley, trying to translate its teachings into Chinese. The lessons, he thought sadly, had not stuck. He watched as the professor filled another bucket and Winslow carried it to the sieve. 'Have you dated the site?' he asked.
'Two or three centuries old at most. There is a layer of char three inches under the surface. A wooden temple, once it burns, leaves so little behind.'
'How large a complex?' Shan asked. Those who lived in the temple surely would have known how to find the valley's deity.
'Small,' the professor said, pointing to a pattern of holes that radiated out from the cleared rectangle, which he must have used to gauge the extent of the char layer. 'One central building, with a small walled yard.'
'What happens to your findings?' Shan asked.
'We are allowed one more week,' the professor sighed. 'Then we write a report and send it to the bank. They have a form we complete, certifying that a comprehensive analysis was performed and that no unique artifacts of importance were discovered. Then someone puts it in a file and forgets it.'
Shan studied the rigid set of the professor's jaw. 'You've done this before.'
'All over the Tibetan regions. Amdo. Kham. Tsang.' He was using the old Tibetan names for the lands, not Beijing's. 'Good summer projects for my graduate students.'
The sound of a heavy truck interrupted the professor. They turned to see Lin's troop trucks driving rapidly along the western side of the valley, abreast of each other, deliberately destroying the spring barley.
