The City of Sand

by Tianxia Bachang

  First we lifted the professor and Little Ye, neither of whom were able to move, into the narrow space, and then we slid in there ourselves. Once inside, I could see that it actually went back some distance, and there were many other cracks in the ground beneath us—though fortunately, none more than a few inches wide, so there was no worry about falling through.

  Julie’s calm had always been amazing, and she remained unflustered even now. She quickly studied our surroundings, including the larger cracks behind us, and seemed to come to a decision. “Is it possible to blow up the entrance and keep the snakes from following us in?” she asked.

  A few of the creatures had already slithered in and were preparing to launch themselves into the air and attack us. Julie hastily snapped her camera at them a few times, until the flash drove them back.

  Remembering how much agony Hao Aiguo had died in, I thought Julie had a point—better to be buried alive than pumped full of venom. I rummaged through my rucksack and found the last of our explosives. No time to calculate how much to use or to work out detonation times, as I usually would. No time for anything but to stick a fuse into the mass and yell at the others to get well back. I set them off and started retreating myself, walking backward and firing my rifle at any snakes that made it up to the entrance. The crack curved several paces on, and I turned the corner to find Julie and the rest safely pressed against the wall.

  Quickly, I called out that they should keep their mouths open and cover their ears or the blast might deafen them. Even before I’d finished speaking, a massive boom went off, echoing through the cave. A surge of debris and hot air shot toward us. Even though we’d gotten out of the way of the direct blast, the energy still pushed us back hard, as if someone had punched us all in the chest. My ears felt numb, and a humming sound filled my brain. I couldn’t hear anything else.

  Kai was screaming something at me, but I couldn’t make out the words. Speaking slowly so he could lip-read, I said, “I—think—I—used—too—much. Are—you—all—right?” I had no idea whether any actual sounds came out of my mouth. My eardrums had been battered by the explosion, and even my own voice had become inaudible to me.

  The air was filled with swirling dust, and the ground was covered with shards of black rock. I peeped out from my cover, shining my flashlight toward the entrance we’d crawled through. It was completely blocked—the black snakes wouldn’t be able to get through that wall of debris. Of course, that also meant we had no chance of going back the way we’d come.

  Kai seemed fine—he’d been scratched on the arm by flying stones but otherwise was unharmed. Professor Chen remained unconscious, and Little Ye had fainted too, unable to stand the shock of the heat and force of the blast.

  I placed a finger beneath her nostrils and shuddered. This was bad—she’d stopped breathing. We had to do something quickly. Little Ye had always been frail, and now the blast had taken her out altogether. How could we revive her?

  Kai, Julie, and I were the only ones left conscious, and we couldn’t communicate with words—at least, not at the moment, the explosion having left us deaf, hopefully temporarily.

  I signaled for Julie to give Little Ye mouth-to-mouth, when I noticed a trickle of blood from Julie’s nose. I gestured to tell her.

  She shrugged and casually mopped up the blood with her sleeve. Then she wrote in blood on her palm, pointing at Little Ye. I shined my flashlight at Julie’s hand, on which were the red-brown letters “CPR.”

  What did that mean? I had no idea what these English symbols stood for. Was she saying Little Ye was beyond hope?

  Seeing my baffled look, Julie shook her head and, ignoring the blood streaming from her own nostrils, bent down to start pressing hard against Little Ye’s chest, pumping rhythmically.

  Now I understood. She’d been asking me to stimulate Little Ye’s heart by pressing down on it. Just as I was about to take over, Little Ye gasped and drew a breath, then began coughing without a pause. I quickly grabbed my water bottle and gave her a few sips.

  Seeing that Little Ye was all right, Julie stood and tilted her head back, pressing against her ears until her nosebleed stopped.

  The situation had barely stabilized, but I didn’t have time to think about the predicament we were in before a new threat materialized. This so-called Guidong was in the depths of the Zaklaman Mountains, which it turned out were hollow—like an empty black shell. And we were now somewhere beneath that shell.

  This void in the center of the mountain range had put pressure on the structure over the millennia, creating thousands of cracks through the stone. The explosives had sealed the entrance behind us, but they had also jarred the many tiny openings so the sections of stone pressed against one another, then fell like dominoes.

  Although I couldn’t hear anything, I could see and feel that the entire mountain was vibrating. What had been a small crack above us was rapidly widening, and stones were falling from it like hail. As I watched, the shaking grew more severe, and it seemed set to carry on.

  Shielding my head with one hand, I waved for the others to get out of the way. Our only option was to climb upward, away from the blocked entrance. We couldn’t move very fast, what with having to carry the professor and Little Ye, and no sooner had we left one area than it became covered in bits of rock. If we’d paused for even a second, we’d have been buried alive.

  One foot in front of the other, we proceeded until even I wasn’t sure how far we’d climbed. My hands were bleeding from all the sharp rock edges. My breath was ragged, and I could see the others panting too. My heart felt like it was about to burst from my ribs. I was exhausted and thirsty, and my arms were rubbery from the deadweight of Little Ye. Soon, I’d be unable to move my legs at all. Maybe it would be simpler to just give up now, to lie down and let the rocks cover me.

  Just as I had the thought, the crack above us abruptly stopped widening. We took a couple more steps, out of momentum, before slumping down in relief. The way behind us was entirely blocked, but we were safe for now. I reached for my water bottle, gasping, before deciding we should ration our supply.

  “Tianyi, are we trapped here?” Kai asked a moment later.

  I heard him—so at least I wasn’t deaf anymore. Looking at the pitch-black rock around us, I nodded. “I guess so. At least we’re still alive, though I’m not sure for how much longer.”

  Maybe Kai was so tired that his brain wasn’t functioning correctly, because now he turned to Julie. “Miss Yang, in that case, I’ll say my goodbyes to you. In a short while, Tianyi and I will be off to meet the King of Hades, while you’ll be floating to heaven to see your American god. It’s a long journey—I hope you stay safe.”

  “Stop your idiotic babbling,” Julie said. “I can’t listen to another word.”

  I was stretching my jaw and feeling my ears pop. Although there was still a bit of an echo, my hearing had more or less returned. We did a quick tally of our equipment. I’d lost a few things while I was running, and Little Ye hadn’t been able to grab her stuff, so all in all we didn’t have much between us—and just two water bottles for the whole group.

  “This will be hard to accept,” I said, “but it’s the reality. I need to tell you what’s happened. We’re beneath the Zaklaman Mountain range, and there’s no way out in any direction. I don’t know if there are any openings above us, but if not, we’ll run out of air in about half an hour. The rest of the explosives were lost while we were running, and they’re under a few tons of stone now. All of us are either injured or close to death, and the only person in the outside world who knows we’re here is Asat Amat—and I don’t think we can rely on him for help. He’s slippery as an eel, and as soon as he realizes that things aren’t going well, he’ll sneak away to save himself. In fact, he might already be gone. So if you’re waiting to be rescued, I doubt it’s going to happen.”

  “No point in talking about it, then.” Kai sighed. “Divide up the water—my throat’s on fire.”

  I set one
of the water bottles aside for Little Ye and the professor and passed the other one around.

  Julie only managed to take a couple of sips before she choked. “If we all die here, it’s my fault,” she said, almost sobbing. “I shouldn’t have insisted on finding this place. Who cares about the Jingjue Kingdom? I wouldn’t have made such a fuss if I’d known. Look at all the trouble we’re in, and all the people I’ve dragged down with—”

  “Don’t say that,” I interrupted. “We have an old saying in Chinese: people die for money, birds die for food. Kai and I came on board willingly. If we hadn’t been so desperate to earn forty thousand American dollars from you, we wouldn’t be in this situation either. The professor and his students do this for a living. Even if you hadn’t turned up to fund this trip, they’d have found some other way to get here. Discovering Jingjue City is every archaeologist’s dream.”

  My own words suddenly reminded me of something: Julie had once talked about a recurring dream she’d had about Guidong. Hadn’t she said there were chains around the queen’s coffin? So she’d predicted that. And there’d been something about an enormous object squatting on top of the coffin, a shadowy shape she couldn’t quite make out. Wasn’t that the corpse bloom?

  When she’d talked about it before, she’d guessed it was a dream sent by her missing father. Now, though, I found the whole thing peculiar. Could it be that Julie had the power to foretell the future? I decided to ask her about it.

  “Absolutely not.” Julie shook her head vigorously. “I used to think I heard a voice asking me to come to Guidong in the Zaklaman Mountains. But when I saw the guidong—that bottomless ghost-hole—I understood that my father and his team had never actually reached this point or set eyes on the pit. I think they must have died in the desert. As for how I could have described this place I’d never seen, I’m at a loss to explain.”

  “What kind of story is that?” Kai pondered out loud. “I know! You must have been the Jingjue queen in your previous life, and now you’ve come back to visit your old stomping grounds—”

  Before he could carry on with his fantasy, a series of rumbling noises emanated from within the mountain. It looked like the earlier tremors had only been the first in the series, and we were about to get a second wave. At least we’d had a rest and could keep running if we needed to. No sense just waiting for death. Before we could move, though, a crack opened up in front of us. I swept the beam of my flashlight at the path ahead and thought I saw a figure on the other side. Was there someone else here?

  The hail of rocks started up again, tumbling on us like fat raindrops. No time to look any farther. We had to run toward the only open space. Julie led the way, holding her flashlight high. Kai followed with the professor, and I dragged Little Ye behind me. All of us quickly wriggled into the newly opened crack.

  Before we could work out where we were, I found myself choking, tears filling my eyes. The air was thick with dust, and after being sealed up for so many years, it was also stale. We quickly pulled on our gas masks. A crash came from behind us. A dozen thick black rock slabs had tumbled down over the entrance, sealing us into this narrow space.

  Seeing there was no way out, I turned back to study our surroundings. We were in a stone chamber, no larger than forty feet square, definitely human-made, with straight walls and corners. In the middle of the floor was an ancient stone chest about a foot and a half high and three feet long. Unlike everything else we’d seen in the Jingjue Kingdom, it was made not of black rock, but of a pale gray stone, with an unusual design that was like nothing we’d ever seen, shaped with exquisite craftsmanship. A sequence of images had been carved into the top, but it wasn’t clear what purpose they served.

  The stone chest took up so much of our attention that we didn’t even notice the two people sitting cross-legged to one side. Only when I got a bit closer did I catch them in my flashlight beam. We jumped back in fright, and I dropped my light, which winked out.

  “Two dumplings! I saw two dumplings!” I heard Kai shouting in the darkness.

  Julie turned on her spare flashlight and shined it at the figures. We relaxed—these were not zombies, but two dried-out corpses.

  One of them looked like a child, but it was hard to tell. Both were a dark brown color, and the older one still had wisps of hair where his beard must have been. His torso was wrapped in sheepskin. The smaller corpse sat next to him, as if they were both keeping watch over the stone box.

  “You shouldn’t throw around words like ‘dumplings,’ ” I said to Kai, sighing in relief. “You nearly scared me to death! These two are more or less fossilized. I bet they’ve been dead more than a thousand years. We must have stumbled into a burial chamber.”

  Julie glared at me and snarled, “I knew the two of you were lying. Tianyi, did you think you could fool me? You’re obviously both grave robbers.”

  My heart thudded. What had we said wrong? Did this American girl actually know what the word “dumplings” meant? Surely that was slang only Kai and I understood. Fortunately, Professor Chen and Little Ye were still out of it and weren’t able to hear this conversation.

  “I thought I told you. I’ve been researching feng shui and astrology in my spare time,” I hurried to explain. “I’m no grave robber. You shouldn’t slander people like that. Kai and I have a good reputation. Just ask anyone in our home village! I once was voted student of the month at my school.”

  Seeing I was going overboard, Kai quickly changed the subject. “Guys, can we focus on the stone box? It’s so weird-looking. What do you think is inside?”

  Julie ignored him. “Gold hanging off a fixed plate. The ocean calling out. Pull aside the bamboo and see a reverse dipper, a high peak. The moon cannot hide distant clouds.”

  A regular person wouldn’t have made any sense of that, but I understood exactly what Julie was saying. These were what we call the “lip lingo” of our trade. Because gold hunters have to do certain unsavory things, we’ve evolved our own secret language—just as bandits refer to kidnapping children as “moving rocks” or to thieves as “little Buddhas.” We called tomb robbing “reverse dipping,” and there were all kinds of code words associated with that, so that when we encountered a fellow reverse dipper we could speak to them with other people present. I’d met a lot of other feng shui experts through my grandfather, some of whom had chosen to use their powers for personal gain—and so as I grew to know more about that world, I’d naturally picked up their lip lingo. At this point, it sprang onto my tongue faster than my village dialect.

  Julie’s words, translated into plain Chinese, went something like, “You’re a bad person, and your mouth is full of lies. I can tell you’re a grave robber—and you’re good at it. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”

  My mind went blank. I wasn’t prepared for this and simply said the first thing that came into my head. “I am no high peak, just a low hill with firewood for boiling water. It is you who are the high peak. Could you show me your pathways and mountain passes?”

  “A river has two banks,” replied Julie. “Both sides are low hills, with firewood. Vultures fly overhead with no need of pathways.”

  She had seen through me and gotten me to admit to being a grave robber. Who would have thought this American girl could play me like that? I’d fallen for it, fair and square. But hang on—how did she know this lip lingo? Hardly anyone in China still spoke this secret language, and even Gold Tooth, whose father had been a reverse dipper for decades, only knew a few words and phrases. It was inconceivable to hear such fluency from Julie. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it myself. Could it be that she was in the profession too?

  Her final words implied that she had picked some of this knowledge up from her family but didn’t know the true craft and couldn’t read feng shui signs or acupoints. Suddenly, I felt it was a terrible idea to have admitted so much to her, and tried to backtrack.

  “I can’t believe I still remembered that! I think I had to memorize
those lines of poetry in elementary school,” I said innocently. “How come you know them too? Do American schools teach that sort of thing?”

  Julie snorted. “Forget it. This isn’t the time and place. If we all survive and get out of here, you and I are having a serious talk.”

  A lucky break—for now. I stood up and looked around for an escape, quietly resolving that if we all got out, I’d vanish and stay far away from Julie forever. Or at least I’d just avoid Beijing for the rest of my life—I didn’t think she’d track me down to my hometown. But no, that wouldn’t work—what about all the money she owed us? Well, it wasn’t clear what her plan was. Either she really did have a crush on me, like Kai said, or she was planning to expose us as thieves. But what was in it for her? Maybe she was a reverse dipper too, and she wanted to join forces with us.

  While my brain spun in pointless speculation, Kai and Julie had already made several rounds of the tiny room, searching every inch of the floor and walls. There were a number of cracks in the black rock, but they were all too small to offer any kind of escape.

  Professor Chen cried out suddenly. He was awake but still unclear in his mind—crying one minute and laughing the next. He didn’t recognize us. We didn’t have any way of treating him, so there was nothing for it but to keep an eye on him and hope his madness was only temporary.

  Having exhausted every other possibility, we turned back to the two desiccated corpses and the stone chest. Even if it were filled with all kinds of jewels, though, it wouldn’t do us much good in our present situation.

  Kai patted the lid. “I guess this is a little burial chamber, and those two poor devils got shut in here. No grave goods for them, just the sheepskin on their backs. We probably won’t find much in here either.”

  Julie had been studying the engravings on the top of the box. Suddenly, she looked up. “Remember I’ve talked about Xuanzang’s Great Tang Records of the Western Regions? That book talked about the Zaklaman Mountains.”