Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  In shape, Lo-tsun’s stupa was similar to the ones lining the stream bed. It reminded Charlotte of a miniature Palomar Observatory—a rounded dome resting on a square base about eight feet high. The door was on the east wall. It was about three feet square, and stood about three feet off the ground. It was made of rough wood planks, and had a round iron door pull, like the door pull on the moon gate at the Oglethorpe Gardens.

  “It reminds me of the door in Alice in Wonderland,” said Marsha as they stood there, wondering what lay on the other side.

  “I hope we don’t end up falling into a rabbit hole,” said Charlotte.

  Reaching out, she tugged gently at the pull. Much to her surprise, it opened right up. Pulling out her flashlight—there was no risk of being seen from this side of the stupa—she shined it into the chamber.

  12

  The interior of the stupa was similar to that of the secret library—a small chamber about ten feet square with a domed ceiling. As Marsha had said, it was a reliquary chamber: against the wall facing the door was a sculpture of a cross-legged Lo-tsun, meditating. As in the secret library, the walls were painted with a procession of Bodhisattvas carrying offerings. The paintings, surras, and other documents that must have once been stored here were gone, probably carried away by looters centuries ago. But in their place was a new cache of treasure—a stack of manuscripts three feet high and equally as long piled up like logs against the north wall.

  “There it is,” said Charlotte, shining her flashlight on the cache. “Wang’s nest egg.” The manuscripts were stored in wrappers made of coarse canvas, which were open at the ends. Each held a dozen or more manuscripts.

  The beam of Charlotte’s flashlight continued its swing around the chamber, revealing a makeshift desk that had been set up against the opposite wall, using a slab of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. A large, battery-operated torch at one corner served as a desk lamp. On the other corner were a couple of smoothly rounded rocks and a magnifying glass.

  “It looks as if the stupa has been doubling as a photographic studio,” she said, as she shined her flashlight on a battery-operated photographic lamp that was mounted on a metal stand at one side of the desk.

  “Why would he need to take photographs?” asked Marsha.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t going to be able to get the manuscripts out of the country right away. In which case, he could store them here, and try to sell them on the basis of photographs.” She nodded at the manuscripts. “Will you be able to tell what he’s got here?”

  “If they’re in classical Chinese. A lot of the manuscripts from Dunhuang were written in obscure Central Asian languages that it would take a linguist to decipher, but I would imagine that the manuscripts Wang held back for himself were in Chinese, since that’s what he read.”

  Walking over to the desk, Charlotte switched on the torch, and then gestured to the old cane chair that was pulled up to it. “Have a seat, my dear.” As Marsha sat down, Charlotte chose two of the most antique-looking bundles from the top of the pile, and set them at the left side of the desk.

  “This is a sutra,” said Marsha as she removed a manuscript from the first bundle and untied the purple silk cord. “The title is here.” She pointed to the outer fold, which bore an inscription in Chinese. Placing the rounded rocks on the right-hand side of the manuscript, she proceeded to unroll it.

  “I wondered what the rocks were for,” said Charlotte.

  “These manuscript rolls are awkward to handle. That’s why the book form was such an important innovation,” Marsha explained as she scrutinized the text with the magnifying glass. As she read, she unrolled the manuscript with her left hand and rolled it up with her right, moving the rocks as she went along.

  The manuscript was about a foot wide, and neatly wound on a wood roller whose end knobs were inlaid with ivory. It consisted of a series of sheets of paper—each about a foot and a half long—which had been glued together. The sheets were lined with columns of tightly packed Chinese writing.

  “The trouble is that the colophon, if there is one, is always at the end,” said Marsha as she continued to unwind the long roll.

  “Colophon?”

  “It’s a tailpiece that’s appended to the manuscript that gives the name of the person who’s acquired merit by paying for the manuscript to be copied, and the name of the person he wants to receive the merit, usually a dead relative. It also gives the date, usually by hour, day, and year. The Chinese saw the importance of dates early on.”

  As Marsha unrolled the manuscript, Charlotte marveled at the paper. She had expected it to be coarse brown, like the early European manuscripts she had seen in museums, but this was fine and smooth and crisp. Nor was it brown, but a deep golden yellow. “Did they dye the paper?” she asked.

  “Yes. Usually it’s yellow, but it can also be other colors. I’ve seen blue, green, pink, orange. I once worked on a manuscript that was made up of a bunch of variously colored sheets all glued together.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Charlotte.

  “Yes. The quality is amazing, especially when you consider that paper was still unknown in Europe during the entire period covered by the Dunhuang manuscripts. The Chinese invented paper in 105 A.D.; the Europeans didn’t get around to it until more than a thousand years later.”

  “If they’re all this long, we’ll be here all night,” said Charlotte as Marsha continued to unroll the manuscript. So far, she had unrolled about fifteen feet and there was no end in sight.

  “I’d guess this one measures about twenty-five feet, which is about average. Some are much longer. But I won’t unroll all of them. I’ll just unroll a few to get an idea of what kind of goodies Wang decided to keep for himself.” She continued unrolling. “At last,” she said, as she came to the end.

  “Is there a colophon?” asked Charlotte.

  “Yes,” Marsha replied. Leaning over the manuscript, she translated the text: “Recently caused to be made for universal free distribution by so and so on behalf of his parents. Copying made at the shen hour on the fifteenth day of the fourth moon, etc. It’s Tang,” she said. “Nine hundred and four.”

  For the next half-hour, Charlotte brought manuscripts to Marsha, and Marsha scanned them. As she worked, the pile of finished manuscripts at her right grew bigger and bigger. At last, she leaned back in the cane chair.

  “Finished?” asked Charlotte, who had taken a seat on the platform that supported the sculpture of Lo-tsun.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “And?”

  “Except for the first manuscript we looked at and one or two others, there isn’t a Buddhist sutra in the lot.”

  “What are they, then?”

  “The British Museum catalogue describes these kinds of manuscripts as Taoist, but they’re really not religious texts. They’re treatises on medicine, divination, dream interpretation, and calendar-making, all of which the Chinese traditionally considered Taoist activities.”

  “If Wang was a Taoist monk, it would make sense that those would be the kinds of manuscripts with which he would be least willing to part.”

  Marsha nodded. “They’re also valuable because they’re so unusual.” She beckoned Charlotte over. “Come here. There’s one that I want to show you.”

  Charlotte came over and stood by Marsha’s shoulder.

  From the pile on her right Marsha extracted a worn-looking manuscript whose protective outer fold with the silk tape used for tying it up had been torn off. Placing the rocks on the right-hand side to hold it down, she slowly unfolded a section of the manuscript.

  Like the Buddhist sutra, the paper was covered with vertical columns of Chinese writing. But interspersed among the blocks of text were several large individual Chinese ideographs.

  “What is it?” asked Charlotte.

  “It’s a copy of the I Ching. The selfsame book of wisdom that you’ve been consulting, but of course”—she smiled—“a much earlier edition. It would make s
ense that Wang would hold this one back, being a soothsayer.”

  “Really!” Charlotte exclaimed. “Are these the hexagrams, then?” she asked, pointing to the large ideographs.

  “Yes. And this is the commentary.” She pointed to the blocks of text. “This is the ‘The Wanderer,’ the hexagram you had Kitty cast for you. If you look closely, you’ll see that it wasn’t handwritten, it was block-printed.”

  “Like the Diamond Sutra?” asked Charlotte.

  Marsha nodded. “Which makes it very unusual indeed. The Stein Collection contains only twenty specimens of block printing.”

  Studying the document, Charlotte saw that the letters were more uniform than those of the handwritten manuscript. “I see what you mean. The paper’s not like the other manuscripts either.” Instead of a deep golden yellow, it was stained a light lemon color.

  “That deep yellow is characteristic of the Tang,” said Marsha. “This may be later. I didn’t look to see if there was a colophon on the first go-round.” Unrolling the manuscript with one hand and rolling it up with the other, she moved ahead to the end of the roll, which wasn’t as long as the first, but was still well over ten feet. “It’s here,” she said, studying the tailpiece. Suddenly she spun around and looked up at Charlotte. “It’s Sui,” she said quietly, her thick dark brows creased together in bewilderment.

  “What does that mean?” Charlotte had yet to master the dates of the Chinese dynasties. As a mental exercise, it was matched for tedium only with memorizing the dates of the British kings and queens. She knew the dates of the Tang and a couple of the other most important dynasties, but beyond those she referred to her trusty wallet card.

  “Let me take another look,” Marsha said. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.” With the magnifying glass, she slowly went over the colophon again. Then she looked back up at Charlotte. “It means”—she laid a hand on the manuscript—“that this is the oldest printed book known. The date is 592 A.D.”

  “Older than the Diamond Sutra!” said Charlotte. Even she knew the date of the Diamond Sutra off the top of her head: 868 A.D. It was one of those dates, like the Norman Invasion or the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that every schoolchild in her day was made to memorize.

  Marsha nodded. “By almost three hundred years.” Her low voice trembled with excitement. “And older than the Gutenberg Bible by close to a millennium.”

  They decided to put the manuscripts back on the pile to avoid tipping off the manuscript thief that they had been there. As they worked, Marsha talked about the I Ching manuscript. Chinese historical documents claimed that block printing had been invented in the Sui dynasty, and it made sense. The Diamond Sutra—which had been the earliest known example of block printing until their manuscript thief found the I Ching manuscript in a cubbyhole—was a very sophisticated work. By its very excellence, it supported the idea that it must have had predecessors. But until now, no earlier examples of Chinese printing had turned up, which Sinologists attributed to the destruction wrought during the civil wars at the close of the Tang dynasty. As Charlotte was now learning, the Cultural Revolution was only the most recent of many paroxysms of anti-intellectual ferment that had convulsed China over the centuries, each with its attendant book-burnings and library sackings. Her new perspective on Chinese history had given her renewed confidence in the ability of this great culture to rise again from the ashes of its most recent destruction.

  The discovery of the I Ching manuscript was bound to cause a sensation. Charlotte imagined how Chu would gloat: the world’s oldest known book would now be the property of the Dunhuang Academy instead of the British Museum.

  It took them only a few minutes to put the manuscripts away. Though they were probably under some sort of obligation to notify the authorities of their find, they decided to wait until they could identify the manuscript thief. The memory of Ho’s convoy tearing out to Larry’s camp was still fresh in Charlotte’s mind. If they did notify him, she was afraid that his careless handling of the case would tip off the thief in some way, and that they would lose their chance of finding out who it was who had murdered Peter, and probably Larry as well. Besides, it was only a matter of another twenty-four hours. If the thief held true to pattern, he would be working on the eighth cave on the list tonight.

  They said little on the way back. For one thing, they were both still awe-stricken at having stumbled across the world’s oldest printed book; for another, voices carried dangerously well in the desert silence. They were also fighting a piercing west wind that had come up while they were in the stupa.

  As they drew near the compound, the air suddenly began to vibrate with a weird, unearthly sound, like a ghostly chorus of thousands of lost souls from the depths of hell, sobbing and wailing.

  “What’s that?” asked Charlotte as the “voices” swelled to a haunting crescendo. She wasn’t afraid. She knew the strange vibrations must have some physical explanation, but she was definitely spooked.

  “One of the desert’s weirdest phenomenons,” said Marsha, as the eerie wailing faded away into a quavering moan. “They’re sounds caused by the fracturing of rocks. During the day, the rocks expand in the heat. Then, when the cold night wind plays over them, they contract and crack. Marco Polo wrote about them: the locals attribute them to ghosts from the battle of Dunhuang, or to the kwei, the devil spirits who lure travelers to their deaths in the desert.”

  As if in response to Marsha’s comments, two kwei suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They were slender spirals of sand about ten feet high, which seemed propelled by an invisible force. For a moment, Charlotte and Marsha watched them swirl and dip across the desert floor as if dancing to a soundless orchestra. From a distance they looked elegant, but Charlotte had the feeling that had they been closer, they would have been very frightening.

  “Marco Polo wrote about the kwei too,” Marsha continued. “They almost always come in pairs: yin and yang, each spinning in a different direction. The yin, or female, spirits are said to fold their dusty cloaks around them from left to right and the male, or yang, spirits from right to left.”

  “Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire,” said Charlotte.

  “The desert people say they’re spirits connected with darkness and death who want to be reclothed in the flesh. If they don’t find a human body to possess, they’ll settle for the dust of the desert to cover their nakedness.”

  “Reynolds told me that Larry’s servants attributed his death to the kwei,” Charlotte said. She wrapped her sweater more tightly around her against the wind. “I can see why.”

  Again, the desert began to give off its eerie wail, and then the kwei skipped blithely off into the darkness as mysteriously as they had come.

  By the time she got back to her room, Charlotte felt as if she was about to collapse. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. It had been a very long day: the meeting with Reynolds, her search of Peter’s room, the traipse out to the dig, their search of the caves, and finally, their trip out to the stupa. No wonder she was tired. But it had also been a rewarding day. If she hadn’t unraveled the knotted tangle, at least she had separated a few of the most important strands.

  She wanted to go right to bed, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to throw the coins again, to seek guidance from the world’s oldest book of wisdom, a book that was already old when some Chinese printer set wood block to paper almost fifteen hundred years ago. The piercing desert wind was still blowing, and, when she crossed the rug to fetch the I Ching from her desk, the static electricity made the hairs on her arms rise and gave her fingertips a shock when she touched the desk’s metal rim.

  Kneeling on the carpet, she threw the coins on the dusty tile floor. The hexagram she cast was Hexagram 5: “Waiting.” The image was of clouds massing in the sky, a sign that it would soon rain. The I Ching’s advice was to wait: there was little else she could do until the rain fell, it said. “It is the same in life when destiny is at work,” it went on. “We shouldn’t interfe
re before the time is ripe.” Meanwhile, it said, she should quietly fortify her body with food and drink, and her mind with gladness and good cheer.

  Further insight into her situation was provided by the changing line, which said that the waiting would soon be over, at which time she would face great danger. She would fall into a pit, and, “precisely in this extremity,” her situation would take an unforeseen turn. Three “uninvited guests” would arrive. At first, she would think they were her enemies, but they would turn out to be her rescuers. She certainly couldn’t complain about a cryptic reading, she thought.

  She continued reading. The conclusion was, “Even happy turns of fortune often come in a form that seems strange to us.”

  “Amen,” she said to herself as she closed the book.

  After washing up in her washbowl, she fell asleep secure in the knowledge that, for the moment at any rate, she didn’t have to do anything.

  She decided to wait out her destiny at the dinosaur dig. The team needed all the help it could get, and she didn’t have anything else in particular to do until their second vigil at the caves that night, anyway. Actually, she did have something to do. Victor and Marsha were going to visit the West Caves at South Lake, a small group of cave temples several miles to the west of Dunhuang, but she decided to skip it. For the moment, she needed a break from Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. She remembered having the same feeling in Italy, about paintings of the Madonna and child. After a while, the numbers became overwhelming. When Bert had asked her if she wanted to join the dig, she had decided that the T. bataar looked far more interesting.

  She had been assigned to a section of the backbone just above the hips. Like the others, her job was to chip the rock away from under the bone until the bone was left standing on a rock pedestal. Then it would be wrapped in strips of burlap that had been soaked in plaster. Once the cast had hardened, the plaster-encased bone would be broken off and packed in crates for shipment. They had begun work early to avoid the midday heat. There were nine of them stretched out along the length of the skeleton—four Americans: Bert, Dogie, Lisa, and Charlotte; and Peng and the four members of his team. As before, the tape deck was blaring out rock and roll music—the Beach Boys, this time.