The Tiger Warrior Part 21

Jack raised his eyebrows. "She's too busy being spoiled by a team of fifteen U.S. Navy SEALs, you mean."

"Every one of them a gentleman."

Jack looked serious. "I don't want navy divers out here right now. Just us."

"They're too busy anyway. There are ticking time bombs in the old Soviet port area, abandoned hulls with nuclear reactors. Where we're diving is officially a no-go zone. It's going to take them months to decontaminate out this far. This is our show. Remember, the only reason those Soviet divers came out here was to hunt for a lost torpedo, and they didn't find it."

Jack reached into the lake to splash some water on his helmet. "The water's warm. Just your cup of tea."

"If it gets any warmer as we go down, I'm out of here faster than you can say Geiger counter."

"That's what we've got these suits for. You designed them."

"We're still going to need a full scrubbing down after this."

"In Hawaii?"

Costas brightened. "That's the first time you've come out with the word. Actually said it, without being prompted."

Jack looked into the lake. In the bay the water was a brilliant blue, like lapis lazuli, like the aura that had emanated from the mine in Afghanistan where they had been two days before. But out here, away from the sh.o.r.e, it was different. The sun bore down directly overhead and bathed the water in an iridescent glow. Some quality of the water, or perhaps the sheer intensity of the sun, meant that the lake seemed to absorb the light and reflect it back a few meters below, as if a layer of liquid silver were floating just beneath the surface. He looked down, and could see no reflection of himself at all. The layer seemed real, like quicksilver spread up from some source below. Jack looked back at the sh.o.r.eline opposite them. He saw a tall bird, a heron, standing stock-still at the entrance to the creek a few hundred meters away. It was serene, like a sculpture, then dipped its beak down into the water. Jack remembered his visit with Rebecca to the terracotta warriors exhibit in London a few months before, standing in front of an elegant bronze bird, which had once adorned a model sh.o.r.eline inside the First Emperor's tomb. Jack looked across to the line of mountains to the south, breathtaking in their grandeur, and raised his hand to shade his eyes, dazzled by the reflection off the snowy peaks that seemed to float above as if they were in some other dimension.

Costas nudged him. "One thing's been bothering me, since Afghanistan," he said. "We know what happened to Howard, but not Wauchope. In the lapis lazuli mine there was no sign of the sacred velpu, the bamboo tube you think they brought with them, taken years before in the jungle. Howard might have been grasping it when he fell, but then someone took it from him. If it was the bad guys, they may have found the jewel too, and the whole story would have been different. Shang Yong would have been sitting in his desert stronghold with the jewel of immortality stuck in his ceiling, planning world domination."

Jack nodded. Since leaving Afghanistan his focus had been on Pradesh, as if his own survival instinct were being marshaled behind their friend. It was only with the a.s.surance that Pradesh would pull through that he had begun to think of everything else, of the man he had shot, of the boy with the suicide bomb. For the man he felt indifference, for the boy a kind of numbness, as if he had seen the explosion on a news report. The shock of that death would sear into him, but not yet. The experience of confronting Howard's body, his great-great-grandfather, was still vivid, as if he were living it now, too early for reflection. But the fate of Wauchope had preoccupied him as they had sailed across the lake, as he had thought of the convergence of all their routes, the Roman legionaries, Howard and Wauchope, all the Silk Road explorers, of themselves, all focused on that mystical spot over the horizon where the sun rose on Chryse, the fabled land of gold in the ancient Periplus.

He turned to Costas. "You remember Wood's Source of the River Oxus, the book we used to locate the lapis mines?"

"Sure. With all the annotations from Howard and Wauchope."

"One of their notes Rebecca pointed out was in the margin of the map at the beginning of the book. An arrow from the valley of the Oxus to the northeast, and the penciled name Issyk-Kul, underlined, beside the word Przhevalsky"

"That Russian explorer?"

Jack nodded. "Przhevalsky actually died here, of typhus in 1888. Rebecca did some research. It turns out he was in London before that, and gave a lecture in the same series at the Royal United Service Inst.i.tution where Howard gave his talk on the Romans in south India. That was just before Wauchope returned from leave to his job with the Survey of India, and both he and Howard attended Przhevalsky's lecture. It was about a rare breed of horses he had discovered in Mongolia, and he mentioned the blood-sweating horses. Then he talked of coming to this place, of the legendary treasures of the lake. He spoke of the Tien Shan range, of his explorations deep into the mountains. I think Wauchope would have been entranced by that, as a pa.s.sionate mountaineer."

"So that's where you think Wauchope went?"

"Tien Shan means celestial mountains. From the Taklamakan Desert, they look closer to heaven than any of the peaks in China. The First Emperor was obsessed with those places, always trying to go as high as he could, to leave his proclamations. He must have looked to the Tien Shan when he sensed his own mortality." Jack swept his arm to the west. "If Wauchope survived the mine, he may have retraced Licinius' route and come toward Issyk-Kul, then made his way into the mountains. Maybe he was like the Romans, and felt he could never go back to his own world. Maybe he and Howard never had any intention of returning. Przhevalsky told of valleys that were not bleak and unforgiving like Afghanistan, but bountiful, lush, lost in time, like Shangri-la. Even if they didn't find the jewels, those stories could have tempted them with something of what the legend of the celestial jewel seemed to offer."

"Or they could have found the jewel in the mine. Wauchope could have gone back with it to the jungle. He could have put the jewel inside the bamboo tube and returned the sacred velpu to the Koya people. He could have found a way into the jungle shrine through the waterfall at the back, and hidden it there. Maybe inside Licinius' tomb. What they'd done in the jungle in 1879 must have been on Howard's mind in his final hours. That's the time when people think of atonement, redemption. Wauchope may have made a promise to him at the end, and then carried it out. That's the kind of thing friends do. They were soldiers, blood brothers. Like Licinius and Fabius."

Jack squinted at Costas. "Yes. Maybe."

"We're almost there." The boat slowed down, and began to trace a wide arc toward sh.o.r.e. "There's something more immediate we need to discuss."

"Go on."

Costas squinted at the water. "Have you noticed that when there's a breeze, it hardly ruffles the surface?"

Jack nodded. "It makes the water seem sluggish, heavy, like molten metal."

"It's because the westerly wind is funneled upward as it approaches land. But did you see the shimmer on the surface a few minutes ago?"

Jack nodded. "Seismic aftershock?"

"Worse. Seismic labor pains. There's been a big quake already, and there's almost certainly another one coming. Today, maybe tomorrow. Not the ideal diving conditions, but it could be good for us. We're looking at proximal and distal delta deposits, some glacial out-wash, incised by basinward-converging channels. A lot of piled-up silt."

"You mean there could be a turbitude."

"A deformation, a sediment slip. It could reveal those walls, if they exist. They could be visible one moment, and then poof, another tremor and another sediment slip, and they're gone. We could be lucky. If there's anything there, now might be the time to see it."

"You remember the last time we were diving?"

Costas sighed. "Eight days ago. The Red Sea. Beautiful water, coral reefs. Paradise." He paused. "Elephants. Underwater elephants."

"That's what I was thinking about. Your elephants. Did you ever hear the old Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant?"

Costas looked back bemusedly. "Three blind men are led to an elephant, not having been told what it is. One feels the tail, and thinks it's a rope. One feels the trunk, and thinks it's a snake. One feels a tusk, and thinks it's a spear."

"Remember how I nearly didn't see that elephant on the seabed? I was too close to it. Remember that when we're down there today."

"What we'll see? A layer of brown, then darker brown. It becomes warmer, then hot. We start to glow. Then some Russian mobster fishes us out and sell us to terrorists as components of a dirty bomb."

Jack grinned. "The geologists say the lake is gradually emptying, you know."

"Emptying?"

"It's always been a mystery where all the glacial runoff goes, pouring down those slopes from the Tien Shan. The lake's like a huge ornamental pond, which the fountains never seem to fill up. It's as if somewhere in the depths there's a giant plug."

"That's another reason not to dive here. I'm not going to be sucked into some black hole."

"Speaking of black, did you know they say the Black Death came from here?"

"What?"

"The Black Death. The plague. Sometime in the fourteenth century, carried along the Silk Route on the backs of rats."

"You're kidding me. The Black Death. From this lake. The one I'm about to go swimming in."

"I wouldn't worry about it. Personally I think it's another myth, created to keep people away from this place. All the more reason to explore it, if you ask me."

"Hawaii," Costas muttered, raising his hands in prayer. "Why is it that every time there's a light at the end of the tunnel, you make me go through another nightmare?"

Jack slapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. "Because you're my dive buddy. And I need you to watch out for me."

The boat was on idle now. Jack sniffed the air. It was an unexpected smell, not the usual slightly rank odor of a lakesh.o.r.e, but the scent of herbs, of lavender, of crushed dry leaves. The wind here came powerfully from the west, sweeping across the water like an army of ghosts, but the smell held the exotic fragrance of the east. On the sh.o.r.e Jack had glimpsed distant ramparts, the minaret of a fallen mosque, toppled by an earthquake, and he sensed a handhold from over the mountain pa.s.s, from the foothills of China beyond. The western end of the lake, where they had met Katya and Altamaty among the petroglyphs, was a place of desolation, a place people only pa.s.sed through by necessity; but here to the east there was permanence, a place people had chosen to settle, Han traders of antiquity, Sogdian, Mongolian followers of Genghis Kahn and Dungan Muslims, expelled from the western fringes of China within living memory.

One of the crewmen made his way toward them from the deckhouse. "We've been in contact with sh.o.r.e. The seismic readout remains unaltered, but it's still condition orange. The navy divers have been clearing a collapsed jetty, which is why the Zodiac's been delayed. They hope to be heading out here in about fifteen minutes. We're over the GPS coordinates now. The advice is not to go in, but if you have to, do it now. Keep at least ten meters above the seafloor. And avoid any deep gullies. I repeat, the advice is not to go in."

"Advice understood, Brad," Costas said, struggling into the strap of his cylinder backpack. The crewman moved over to help him. "Jack and I have dived into a lava tube, you know," he said, gasping. "Into a live volcano. In Atlantis."

"Yeah? Cool."

"No. Hot." Costas peered up at the crewman, who pointed skeptically into the water. They had spent most of the voyage together in the deckhouse talking about torpedoes and radiation leaks. "Don't say it, Brad," Costas said. "Just don't say anything at all."

"I was just going to say good luck, sir."

"Sir again," Costas grumbled. "Me, sir?"

"Lieutenant-commander, U.S. Navy, as I recall," Jack said.

"A nuts-and-bolts man. Just one of the guys. And I never pulled rank."

"That's because you're a born leader, and everyone always listens to you," Jack said, pushing his shoulder.

"Everyone except you."

"I don't need to listen. I just follow." Jack slapped Costas' back, then nodded at the crewman, who eased down the mask on Costas' helmet, snapping closed the locks, and then did the same for Jack. Both men ran through their life support systems, checking the computer screen readout inside their helmets, then double-checked each other. The crewman put up a splayed hand and pointed at his watch. Jack nodded at him. Five minutes to go. The engine revved slightly, and he felt the boat move as they repositioned. For a few moments before activating his intercom Jack was completely cut off All he could hear was his own breathing, the pounding of his heart, a slight ringing in his ears, a legacy of gunfire. He thought again of Wauchope, and then of the Romans. Maybe one of the legionaries had survived too, made it ash.o.r.e, escaped east over the saddle of the mountains toward Chryse, the land of gold. Maybe it was Fabius himself Jack wondered whether they would ever know. He had only his instinct to go on, and that told him the story did not end in the waters here.

Jack looked down and saw the layer of reflection again, like quicksilver. He shook away the thought and switched on his intercom. Costas gave him the thumbs-down signal, and Jack repeated it. He felt the suck of the air from his regulator, and checked his gauge readout again. They slipped over the side together. Jack dropped down, under the surface, then floated back up again. He was in his element and was coursing with excitement. He suddenly knew they were in the right place. It was his instinct again. He glanced at Costas, who was bobbing in the water looking at him. Jack put his hand on his buoyancy valve, and pressed the intercom. They always said it. It was their ritual. Their good-luck talisman. He grinned at Costas. "Good to go?"

"Good to go."

Three minutes later they had descended more than twenty meters below the surface. There was no sign of the bottom, but Jack knew from his compa.s.s that they were facing the landward side of the lakebed as it sloped up to the sh.o.r.eline half a kilometer to the east. To begin with the water had been remarkably clear, and Jack had rolled over and seen the dark shape of the boat's hull above, the figures of the two crewmen visible in wavering outline as they peered over the side. He rolled back again just as they hit a thermocline, indiscernible inside his E-suit but registered in a change in temperature on the readout inside his helmet.

"It's getting colder. This might not be radioactive soup after all," he said on the intercom.

"Just as long as all this seismic activity hasn't stirred up anything," Costas replied, his voice tinny with the increased pressure. "Like they said, whatever's down there is probably best left undisturbed."

"I'll remind you of that next time we see something that needs to be defused."

They continued down. Below the thermocline the visibility dramatically reduced, a result of particulate gray and brown matter in the water. Jack sensed a darkness underlying the gloom below them. He flicked on his headlamp but instantly regretted it, dazzled by the glare off the suspended particles in the water. He switched it off again, and blinked as his eyes readjusted to the gloom. He checked his depth readout. Thirty-five meters. Suddenly it was there, a gray, featureless plain about eight meters below them, gently undulating up the slope. "I take back what I said about radioactivity," he murmured. "Looks like something killed this place dead."

He neutralized his buoyancy two meters above the bottom, careful not to stir it up with his fins. "That's nowhere near as solid as it looks," Costas said. "With all this seismic activity, it's soup. Close your eyes, drop down and you wouldn't know you'd gone into it. After a while it'd become glutinous, and you'd be stuck. Only consolation is your body wouldn't be eaten by marine borers. Even they wouldn't live here."

Jack gazed at the sediment. "We're hardly going to see anything ancient sticking out of this stuff, are we?"

"We might. The earthquake's shaken it all up, and the silt that normally blankets the bedrock protuberances and other solid features may have slid down the slope. The brown haze in the water shows there's been movement, a turbitude. But the shake-up also leaves everything unstable. There could be another ma.s.s of sediment farther up the slope ready to drop down and bury whatever might have been revealed."

Jack looked around. "So the walls, the ravine, whatever it was Rebecca saw on the sonar readout, might actually be visible."

"They did the sub-bottom profiler run more than twenty-four hours ago. According to the bearings I programmed into my computer, we should follow this contour for about fifty meters, toward the south. That should put us over the gully, directly opposite that creek on the sh.o.r.eline. The old Soviet seismological reports put this contour at about the level of the sh.o.r.eline two and a half thousand years ago. Everything upslope was dry land. They think there was a single event that put it all underwater, a violent localized quake about 2,200 years ago."

They turned carefully and began to fin south, Costas in the lead. They were within a horizon of improved visibility, able to see five or six meters ahead, beneath the blanket of suspended sediment a few meters above them. Jack scanned the grayness below for anything solid, any protuberance. After about twenty meters Costas suddenly stopped finning. "I've got something," he said. Jack came up alongside. The lake floor was more mottled, irregular. Jack gingerly put out a hand. It was hard clay, smearing his glove. "Looks like a ridge, coming out from sh.o.r.e," he murmured. "It could be decayed mud-brick, but there's no visible stonework, no masonry."

"Check this out." Costas fanned his hand over something embedded in the clay. Jack switched on his headlamp, and gasped in astonishment. "It's a bronze handle," he exclaimed. Costas pulled it out. The handle was attached to a disk about the size of a dinner plate. Jack took it, wafting away the adhering clay. "It's a mirror," he said. "The surface has oxidized green, but it's intact."

"Weird thing to find in this place," Costas said.

Jack turned the object over. "Bronzes like this have been found along this sh.o.r.e before, hauled out by fishermen," he said. "Mirrors, elaborate horse harnesses, cauldrons. It was what first excited the attention of the Russian, Przhevalsky. The objects were all like this, intact, very high quality workmanship, not the kind of things people usually throw away. Rumors spread of a sunken palace, a drowned city."

"Or a tomb?" Costas said.

"That's my gut instinct," Jack said. "But these finds don't fit with the story of Genghis Khan. Mongol tombs were concealed, discreet. And I don't think a Mongol warlord would have had grave goods like these, mirrors, cauldrons. It doesn't add up. But I'll wager this must have been thrown up out of a burial site by the earthquake, something pretty prestigious. That would explain the past finds too. And these are not the result of tomb robbing in antiquity, when this slope was still dry land. Tomb robbers don't abandon valuable items like this."

Costas pointed to where fine lines of incision were visible on the handle, swirling shapes and bulbous eyes. "The decoration reminds me of that halberd Katya found in the Roman burial on the other side of the lake. It looks the same, Chinese."

"I agree," Jack replied. "The local population here includes those displaced Muslim Chinese from the fringes of the Taklamakan Desert, and there were earlier migrations, Uighurs. This mirror looks more than two thousand years old, but back then this end of the lake would have been a cultural melting pot, a staging post between west and east. Prestigious Chinese artifacts could have found their way here. But I don't think that accounts for these finds. Stuff like this wouldn't just be tossed into the lake. These people were traders."

Jack put down the bronze, and Costas placed a miniature electronic beacon beside it. Jack took the lead this time, finning along the forty-meter depth contour. The visibility was still only a few meters, but it was enough to see that the ridge of clay curved around to his left, and the lakebed dropped off to the right. "An erosion channel," Costas said from behind. "This must be the edge of the gully that leads down from the creek, cutting a ravine into the lakebed. It's consistent with the profiler readout. It should be dropping down ten meters deeper, and be twenty meters or so across. I think it's normally smothered in sediment, but the earthquake's shaken it away. This must be the converging feature Rebecca saw on the printout, that looked so promising. Maybe not man-made after all."

"I want to look a bit farther. Just to make sure."

"The mirror's a great find, Jack. We can surface with it like a pair of treasure hunters. Rebecca will be thrilled."

Jack was already finning ahead. "I've just got a feeling about this."

"Yeah, I've got a feeling too," Costas replied urgently. "And it's a bad one. Did you see that?" There was a shimmer in the water, then a shudder. "Jack, there's a wall of sediment about three meters above you. It's where the turbitude slipped down that revealed the channel. Any moment it's all going to come down. We need to get out of here. Now."

Jack looked up, saw the darkness of the sediment wall, then looked down again. He was motionless, spread-eagled above the lake floor. The shudder had lifted a veil of silt that had obscured his vision almost completely. The glow from the headlamp behind him diminished as Costas began to ascend. Jack knew Costas would remain a few meters to one side until he was certain Jack was following. He flicked on his own headlamp, so Costas could see him, and looked at his compa.s.s readout. He had come far enough. There was nothing more to be seen. "Roger that," he said. He reached for the buoyancy control on his E-suit. Costas was right. This was no place to die.

There was another shimmer in the water. Jack was suddenly wary, feeling that he himself was an active part of the forces around them, that his own movement could trigger the next quake. He looked down at the buoyancy valve on the front of his suit, checking that it was clear of sediment that might jam it open. It was a design glitch he had noticed before. He would have a word with Costas about it. He kept his right hand over the valve, then raised his head. His helmet b.u.mped against something. He rolled over and looked up, seeing only the reflection off sediment. It would be unlike Costas to be so close overhead when he knew Jack was ascending. It must be something else. He rolled back, and felt forward with his left hand. It was a solid object, angled out of the lakebed toward him. It felt like a tree trunk. He suddenly remembered the lost torpedo. But this was wrong. The surface was like bark on an old maple, thickly segmented. He felt his way up with both hands, to where it angled above him. If it was an old tree trunk, it was h.o.a.ry, twisted, with the remains of branches on either side. He felt the top. The trunk narrowed, then came out again before ending, like a bulbous growth.

Jack froze. He had seen something.

"You okay? You stopped." Costas' voice came harshly over the intercom.

Jack's voice faltered. "I've got something."

"Drop it. You need to get out of there. Now."

"Roger that." There was another shimmer, and the suspended sediment that had obscured his visibility suddenly flashed away, like a school of tiny fish. There was a moment of total clarity. Jack could see it clearly now.

It was a human head.

It was a statue, made of stone, larger than life, leaning out over the lake floor. He stared at the face. It was like a death mask, the eyes nearly shut, the mouth drawn back in a grimace. High cheekbones, flat nose, thin moustache hanging down, braided. The words of the Kyrgyz legend flashed across Jack's mind. A golden coffin set on a silvery sea. But that was about Genghis Khan. He had dismissed the story. Had he been so wrong? He looked again. What had felt like bark were scales of armor, segmented, overlapping. And he saw that the statue was cradling a sword, a great straight blade, finely shaped out of the stone. It had a long, rounded guard at the hilt, concealing the hand completely. Jack looked back up at the face, and then realized what he had seen. Not a hilt. A gauntlet. He hardly dared believe his eyes. He sank down, and looked closely. It was all there: the feline ears, the almond-shaped eyes, the grimacing mouth where the blade protruded. Jack stared in astonishment at the sculpted figure leaning over him.

A gauntlet sword.

A tiger warrior.

Jack looked up. He could just make out Costas a few meters above, releasing a marker buoy. There was a distant roaring in his ears, a noise that sounded like it came from the bowels of the earth, mixed with the sound of a boat engine. He saw the wall of silt behind the statue, and realized how close he had been. Now it was happening again. The silt was shimmering, blurred. He realized he was being pushed by some force in the water down the slope. He was suddenly over the edge of a black pit, the sides extending off into the swirling silt beyond. The shudder ended, and he sank down. He was fifty meters deep now. He could see where the pit had once been completely buried, where the earthquake had cracked open the hard clay surface and revealed a hollow s.p.a.ce beneath, now almost choked with silt. He saw something white in his headlamp. It was a skull. A human skull. And then he saw more. There were skulls everywhere, human skulls, rows of them, eye sockets empty, jaws hanging down, dislocated, some lolling to left or right. Below the skulls were flashes of green and brown. He sank down farther, into a s.p.a.ce in the pit, until he could see more. There was no doubt about it. The green-brown was metal, bronze. Segmented armor. Rows of skeletons, a whole regiment of them, buried upright in a pit, wearing segmented bronze armor. Ancient Chinese armor. He looked again, scarcely believing what he was seeing. Each skeleton had the remains of a rope around its neck, perfectly preserved in the freshwater of the lake. They were an army for the afterlife. An army who had gone willingly to their deaths.

Jack's mind was racing. The statue, the warrior, must be a guardian. He looked again at the skulls, rapidly disappearing beneath a cascade of silt. The words of an ancient chronicler flashed through his mind. The hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects, were brought to fill up the tomb. He looked up the slope at the statue, just visible in the gloom. Then he realized. The tiger warrior was not a guardian. He was an executioner. Jack looked back at the skulls. These were the true bodyguard, the loyal soldiers, the retainers, those who had built the tomb and brought the body, who had devoted themselves to the whims of their leader, who had sworn to protect the secret, sworn an oath that had failed to protect them. They were not a willing army for the afterlife. They were the victims of ma.s.s murder. They had been murdered not to satisfy the vanity of one who believed he would rule forever, but to satisfy the hunger for immortality of those who thought they were his most trusted lieges, the warriors whose guardianship of the secret would a.s.sure their power for all eternity. Suddenly Jack knew for certain. Rebecca had been right. There was something here, something in the darkness beyond, something so astonishing he could scarcely believe it. The secret of the First Emperor's tomb.

Suddenly it was happening again. Something was sucking him down. He began finning, kicking hard. For the first time on the dive he felt the icy grip of fear, as if there were some empty s.p.a.ce in the macabre army reserved for him, for having dared to see what he had seen. He was going nowhere. He realized that the entire lakebed was moving, sliding down the slope. The statue and the pit had vanished. A ma.s.sive surge threw him sideways, pushing him away from the gully. Then he was miraculously clear, floating above the storm of sediment, bathed in sunlight. He saw Costas only a few meters away. The intercom indicator inside his helmet was flashing red, and he realized that it must have failed. He flashed an okay signal to Costas with his hand, then saw Costas do the same. He looked down again, breathing hard, waiting for his pulse to slow before ascending.

He shut his eyes. He had seen something else. Something in the split second of that jolt. Something that had flashed into view while the sediment was sucked off the lakebed in a swirling vortex. He had seen walls, great stone walls, lining the sides of a pa.s.sageway, converging at a dark entranceway in the side of the slope, sealed in with more stone. He opened his eyes. He was sure of it. He thought of what else he had seen down there, what he had touched. He looked up toward the surface, through water that was now sparklingly clear. They were less than twenty meters deep, and he was sure he saw the wavering line of snowy peaks to the south, cutting through the silvery reflection of sunlight on the surface. The words of the Chinese chronicler came into his head again. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Then he realized. There, in the tomb at Xian, it had all been artifice. Here, below the celestial mountains, where the lake was liquid like mercury, it was all real. Here, where the realm of heaven was on the horizon to be seen, and the orb of the earth and the heavens could truly be the domain of one emperor.