“Yes, since the time of Admiral Zheng He and China’s treasure fleets.”
“I’m not familiar with-”
“Not too many people are,” Tisa said. “Zheng He was a eunuch slave who became one of China’s greatest military commanders. From 1405 to 1433 he was in command of seven epic journeys that ranged as far as the Persian Gulf, Madagascar and the mainland of Africa. Some say he went to South America too, and there’s archaeological evidence to back that claim. His ships were the most magnificent ever built and the largest too. The treasure ships were four hundred feet long at a time before Christopher Columbus used a puny ninety-footer to discover America. If I’m not mistaken, Admiral He’s ships were the biggest until the Industrial Revolution.”
“I had no idea.”
“You’re the victim of a Western-biased education,” she said to tease. “This period during the Ming Dynasty was the only time in China’s history that they looked beyond the Middle Kingdom and sought trade with other nations rather than wait for traders to come to them. The Ottoman and Persian empires were in full flower and the trade of goods and knowledge were unprecedented. The Ming navy was the most powerful in the world and stood poised to dominate the sea-lanes had they chosen. No nation could have stopped them. And then the emperor decreed an end to ocean commerce and China once again closed her borders to all but a few struggling along the Silk Road. The fleet of ships was destroyed, crews and captains who’d seen the distant lands were put to death. Much of what had been brought to China was burned.”
Mercer was enthralled with her story, imagining the vast wealth the Chinese must have accumulated. “Why?”
“No reason need be given. No one dared question the orders of the emperor. But one man did. He was a Confucian scholar named Zhu Zhanji, a master scribe in the emperor’s court who decried the destruction and risked his life to spirit away the best of what the traders had brought back. The cache included scrolls and texts gathered from the four corners of the globe, works of advanced mathematics being developed in the Arab world, as well as priceless pieces of art, ivory carvings, gems and tons of gold. It was a storehouse of knowledge and human ingenuity, perhaps the greatest ever amassed.”
“You’re describing something along the lines of the Library of Alexandria.”
“Perhaps some of that collection was part of what Zhu gathered. Who knows? Legend has it that an observer standing on a tall mountain couldn’t see the entire length of the caravan. Zhu Zhanji took the treasure trove deep into western China, into an isolated valley called Rinpoche-La, and bade the local people to guard it well. Zhu died on his return to the imperial court and the archive appeared lost for all time. But Zhu hadn’t chosen this valley by accident.
“Rinpoche-La was an enigmatic place, fabled because even though it was high in the foothills of the Himalayas, it remains warm year-round. The village was built near geothermal springs deep inside the mountains, allowing for a standard of living not found anywhere else in that barren part of the country.”
“Sounds like James Hilton’s book,
“His story of Shangri-La is very likely based on the legend of Rinpoche-La,” she concurred, “similar to how Bram Stoker was inspired to write
“I assume the gold.”
“More Western bias,” she teased. “No, it was a set of blueprints and some texts, a gift to the emperor from the Sultan of Muscat, perhaps the richest man in the world at the time the treasure fleets roamed the Persian Gulf. No one knows how he came about the documents. It is believed they were created by one of his great mathematicians. When I heard these stories as a child, I imagined him to be like an Arab Leonardo da Vinci. It took generations for the monks at Rinpoche-La to understand the full potential of what they were studying, and many more years, centuries, in fact, for them to attempt to build the oracle described in the sultan’s plans.”
“An oracle?”
“They called it the Navel of the World, a machine that could accurately measure the earth’s chi. They completed the work in the 1850s and set about to see if the machine was right. And soon found it was. Uncannily so. For years they sent people to chronicle the effects of the chi and report back to the Lama what they’d seen. And that’s the way it remained until the summer of 1908 when a cataclysmic event upset the planet’s delicate balance of forces.”
The year triggered another memory for Mercer. “Can I venture a guess as to the exact date? June thirtieth, 1908.”
This time it was Tisa’s turn for a moment of stunned silence. “How did you…?”
“That’s when a meteorite slammed into Siberia near the village of Tunguska and leveled several thousand square miles of forest. The blast was heard in Scandinavia and darkened the sky as far as London. Can’t be too many other cataclysmic events that year.”
Her eyes were still wide. “Few people have even heard of the event and yet you know the exact date.”
“I’ll tell you the story why sometime,” he said evasively, then steered the conversation back to her tale. “You believe the impact changed the earth’s balance in some way.”
“Not the planet’s, obviously, but the chi forces. Up until then, the earth behaved as the oracle at Rinpoche-La predicted. After the event, the predictions were no longer accurate. The Lama and his acolytes became concerned. The times and locations between predicted events diverged further as the years passed. Twenty years ago it was decided that the Order had to do something to correct it. We would heal the earth and restore its proper balance of chi.”
“And the tower is one way you do this?”
“Oh, no,” Tisa dismissed. “That is just one small project. A short-term, ah, Band-Aid.” She smiled at her turn of phrase. “Our main efforts are a little more subtle. You see, to rebalance the world we must focus on points where the earth’s chi lines intersect. This is becoming more difficult because humanity is also beginning to affect chi with such things as atomic bomb tests and hydroelectric dams that shift rivers. These all change the force lines.”
Mercer was having a hard time keeping the skepticism from his expression. There could be some truth in the history Tisa had told him, but he didn’t believe a word about the interpretation. He was taunting when he said, “So you guys must hate what China is doing at the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest hydro project in history.”
“On the contrary,” she replied quickly. “Members of our group were on the committee to see it built. Three Gorges is an important nexus point for chi. The weight of the water is helping to bring the earth balance.”
Mercer scoffed. “Come on, Tisa. This is ridiculous.”
“Eight years ago you were approached by a company called Jaeger Metals to help them in the development of a copper mine in Brazil. Do you remember that?”
“Vaguely,” Mercer said uneasily. “I turned them down. How do you know about that?”
“Because the Order controls Jaeger Metals. Do you recall why you refused the job?”
“They wanted to shift billions of tons of overburden for a copper deposit that didn’t justify the expense. I tried to tell them they were pouring money into a hole with no bottom but no one on the board of directors cared.”
“Do you know what happened to Jaeger?”
“Yeah, they went ahead with the project, dug a three-mile-wide, eight-hundred-foot-deep pit in the middle of the jungle and went bankrupt.”
“What you didn’t know, what no one knew, is that spot in the jungle was a chi point and by removing all that dirt we managed to regain five minutes of accuracy.”
“I-” Mercer checked his sarcasm. Could that possibly be true? At the time, he’d suspected that the whole debacle was a financial swindle of some sort. He’d followed the story in trade magazines after bowing out and recalled that Jaeger had blown about seventy million dollars before giving up, but when the mining company folded no one came forward with a complaint. An SEC investigation after the collapse found all the money had come from a private source that was satisfied with Jaeger’s “good faith” efforts. Could Tisa’s group be that private source? Could all they have wanted was a giant hole and not the copper?
