Dr. Aaron Weiskopf, Professor of Archeology and Oriental Antiquities, looked at the fragment of carved jade the young Chinese boy had brought him. Weiskopf had spent eighteen seasons excavating in the region of the Yellow River valley, and he knew a piece of Shang sculpture when he saw it. This one, the head and left shoulder of a figurine, had been very skillfully wrought, evidence of its having been made for someone of wealth and importance, perhaps even a king.
It was mid-April, and Weiskopf had just arrived in Zhengzhou, capital city of Henan Province in east-central China, for his nineteenth summer of work. He was well known in the busy city. This lad had come to the guesthouse on the city’s outskirts where Weiskopf and his team habitually stayed and loitered outside until the foreign devil who digs things up appeared on the verandah to drink his morning coffee and smoke his ornately carved Meerschaum pipe.
Weiskopf, fifty-six years of age, with dark hair showing almost no gray, brown eyes, and a round face, had excavated dozens of tombs and village sites over the years. He had shipped vast quantities of material home to his university in Leipzig, but his greatest ambition had so far remained unfulfilled. His dream was to find and excavate the tomb of Da Yi, first king of the Shang, and his plan for this year was to continue the search. Chinese and European archeologists had excavated many Shang cities and tombs since the early years of the twentieth century, but the final resting place of Da Yi had eluded them all.
Since its founding by the Republican government of China, the Guomindang, in 1928, archeologists from the Academia Sinica had been excavating a site at Yinxu, near the city of Anyang, which appeared to be the site of the largest known Shang city. This urban center, called Yin, had become the probable Shang capital long after Da Yi’s death, and Weiskopf doubted his tomb would be found anywhere near there. There were older Shang sites near Zhengzhou, including an entire city, and he believed he had a better chance of finding the tomb here, if it still existed.
One of Europe’s most celebrated sinologists, Weiskopf was able to read the divinatory inscriptions on Shang oracle bones fluently, as well as the characters on cast bronze vessels and other artifacts. He was also considered an authority on the ancient texts of the Zhou and Qin Dynasties which followed the Shang. His numerous publications had added greatly to the general academic understanding of Shang society and governance, while his excavations had contributed to an enlarged appreciation of the power and wealth of Shang kings. Folk traditions declared these monarchs to be buried with all manner of grave goods designed to serve them in the hereafter. Horses, chariots, a fortune in cowry shell currency, ceramics, bronze weapons and ritual vessels of every size and description, gold jewelry, ivory, jade, tiger skins, and the bodies of hundreds, if not thousands, of slaves. Excavations of royal tombs had shown many of these wondrous tales to be exaggerations — perhaps attempts by classical historians to distinguish themselves through the revelation of such glittering details — but, archeologists reasoned, there must be a grain of truth in it all somewhere. Of the eleven Shang royal tombs excavated since the turn of the twentieth century, only one had been found intact, and the treasures it contained, although not as prodigious as tradition predicted, suggested Da Yi’s resting place, if undisturbed by thieves and vandals, might well yield an artifact assemblage of unparalleled worth and importance.
Now, studying the broken piece of carved jade, Weiskopf wondered what it might mean. Clearly it was a Shang sculpture, the style and method of manufacture confirmed that fact, but beyond that, nothing could be learned from the fragment itself. Its quality alone did not guarantee it came from the tomb of a king, much less that of Da Yi. It could easily be from the grave of a high official, a royal wife or concubine, a military leader, a nobleman or woman, or even a wealthy merchant, yet there existed the tantalizing possibility it could be from the tomb of a king, and if a king, why not Da Yi himself? Speaking perfect Chinese, he asked the young lad how he had obtained the jade.
“I found it,” he answered, with an enigmatic smile. “They say you are a foreign devil who digs up old things, so I brought it here for you to buy.”
Well, thought Weiskopf, at least he’s clear about that, and I’ll bet he’s no more than ten or eleven years old.
Feeling in his pocket, Weiskopf withdrew a Yuan Shikai dollar, and the youngster’s eyes shone at the sight of it. This was real money.
Introduced in 1914 during the short-lived presidency of General Yuan Shikai following the overthrow of the Empress Dowager, the coin Weiskopf offered was prized for its guaranteed weight and silver content; much sought after in comparison to the numerous base metal trade dollars, cheap copper coins, and the dubious paper currency which could all be found everywhere alongside the old, square-holed bronze coinage of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. The Yuan silver dollar bore an unusually large representation of the president’s head on its obverse and was thus often called a Yuan Da Tou.
“A Yuan Big Head,” exclaimed the lad in delight.
“It is indeed,” said Weiskopf, handing over the coin.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“One thank you is quite enough, young man,” said Weiskopf, laughing. “but now you listen to me carefully. That dollar is for you in payment for the jade, but I will give you five more if you show me where you found it.”
* * *
The following morning Weiskopf breakfasted with his assistant for the last two seasons, Dr. Eduard Schilling, and showed him the jade. Schilling, an energetic man of forty-five with blue eyes and a full, iron-gray beard, studied the fragment intently, turning it over in his large hand several times before nodding.
“It’s Shang all right. Might have come from anywhere, but it’s worth an exploration at any rate.”
“Yes, I agree.” Weiskopf finished a steamed savory bun, and then, downing the last of his coffee, he stood up. “Let’s go, shall we? How’s the truck?”
Schilling snorted and shrugged.
“We need a new one, but the budget won’t rise to it.”
Outside in the pleasant morning sunshine they managed to instill some life, albeit tenuous, into the engine of their antiquated Ford truck, and drove, pursued by a cloud of exhaust smoke and noxious fumes, through the crowded streets of Zhengzhou and into the countryside. Weiskopf had obtained directions to the village where they were to meet their young guide, and they passed many isolated huts and smallholdings as they left the city behind.
“What a place,” said Schilling, as they approached the four small, brick-built huts, thatch-roofed and windowless, which comprised the village. Erected adjacent to each dwelling was a pigsty and a fenced yard containing a few bedraggled chickens clucking and pecking at the ground. Around this hamlet, which their guide-to-be had told Weiskopf went by the more than incongruous name of Imperial Forest Village, stretched vegetable fields and rice paddies, their plentiful early growth attesting to the fertility of the soil here in this valley of the Yellow River.
“No sign of a forest or an emperor,” said Weiskopf, as he parked the truck at the side of the dirt road.
As they walked towards the nearest hut, a woman, whose age they could not judge, emerged carrying a wicker basket, the contents of which she flung into the sty, causing a cacophonous squealing and grunting from the dirt-covered pigs. She was thin and boney; her black hair, lank and greasy, straggled down past her angular shoulders. She wore a stained cotton garment which might once have been a blouse, and baggy gray trousers. After staring, hollow-eyed, at the two foreigners for a few moments, she turned her head towards the hut and shrieked in a harsh and piercing voice, “Lai.”
Immediately the youngster, wearing the same ragged blue t-shirt and brown shorts as the day before when Weiskopf met him, bounded out and ran to meet them.
“I was not sure you would come.”
“I promised I would,” said Weiskopf, with a smile. He found Lai an engaging young scamp, but the young scamp’s next words betrayed the reason for his delight in seeing the two visitors.
“Did you bring my five dollars?” He held out his hand.
“You will get them after you show us where you found the jade,” said Weiskopf, “and not before.”
“If the jade is so important,” Lai said, his eyes fathomless pools of innocence, “perhaps seven dollars are better than five?”
“No,” said Weiskopf firmly.
The youngster’s eyes narrowed in obvious suspicion, but he said nothing more.
They coaxed the truck back into life, and with Lai sitting between them, they set off again down the road.
“It is not far,” said Lai, and then, looking intently at Schilling’s beard, he observed, “You are very hairy. A lot of foreigners are hairy. My father has a beard, but it is very thin. Why do you have a beard?”
“My beard means I don’t have to shave, and it keeps the flies away,” said Schilling, in a solemn voice, and after digesting this explanation for a moment or two, Lai nodded.
“I thought it meant you were very old and wise, but that is not so. You are just lazy, and you don’t like flies.”
Weiskopf laughed, glancing sideways at Schilling, who seemed irked by the boy’s impudence.
“Tell me,” he said to Lai, swerving to avoid a deep pothole, and then swerving back again to avoid five white ducks parading in an orderly line across the road, “your crops look very promising, yet your village appears poor. Can you not sell what you grow?”
“What is there to sell?” answered Lai. “We give almost everything to the landlord for rent. There is not much left over, but we are used to being hungry. We do not notice it any longer. My father says it has been that way since he was a boy, and his father before him.”
“No wonder he wants the money,” said Schilling in German, and Weiskopf nodded.
“Ja, it’s as I expected. It’s the same all over China.”
At Lai’s direction, Weiskopf steered the Ford off the road to follow a narrow dirt track running between small fields, some lying fallow, others in grains or vegetables. The truck bounced and jolted its way along until they came to a broad expanse of open, uncultivated ground.
“Here,” said Lai.
“Are you sure?” asked Schilling, “this looks like useless earth.”
“Of course, I am sure,” said Lai. “Can I have my money now?”
“No,” said Weiskopf, “not until you show us the exact place.”
They left the truck and followed the young lad to a patch of stony, uneven ground covered with clumps of dry grass and scrubby, low-growing bushes.
“No one owns this land,” Lai said, as they picked their way across the rough terrain.
“I’m not surprised,” muttered Schilling. “Who would want it, for God’s sake?”
“I came here with my father to see if it could be planted,” Lai want on, “but my father said it could not. He also said there was something underneath.” And pointing in front of him, he said, “See?”
“See what?” asked Schilling.
“Like this,” said Lai, crouching, and putting his head on one side.
“My God, Eduard,” said Weiskopf, sighting across the ground as Lai had demonstrated. “Do you see it?”
“Yes,” said Schilling. “There’s a very slight depression.”
“I’d have missed it if it hadn’t been pointed out,” said Weiskopf.
Lai said, “My father told me that sometimes people have found old things here, so I came by myself one day and tried to dig. There is the hole where I found the jade. It was very easy.”
After drawing a rough sketch outline of the area and the depression which Weiskopf paced out at about ten by six meters, they paid Lai his five Big Heads and drove him home.
“We’ll do a test pit first,” said Weiskopf, as they reached the main road and turned for Zhengzhou. “If there have been artifacts found there in the past, the site may well have been looted, but it’s certainly worth investigating.”
“It may not be a tomb at all,” Schilling pointed out.
“Of course,” said Weiskopf, negotiating a narrow space around a plodding bullock cart laden with what looked like turnips driven by an old man sitting round-backed and oblivious to the world around him, “but there’s only one way to find out. Tomorrow, you go to the local authorities and make sure Lai’s father was right about the land’s not being owned. It will cost a few dollars to bribe someone to look through the records, but just pay it and get written proof with a seal. We have to be absolutely sure about it, because if it is someone’s property and we start an excavation the fines and bribes will be astronomical. Let alone that we might end up in jail hoping the university will pay to get us out.”
Schilling snorted. “Bergdorf would probably pay to keep us in if we caused that much trouble.”
Weiskopf grinned and went on, “Beijing decreed all deeds of land ownership were to be updated and corrected several years ago, so the information should be available. The whole exercise was basically for the benefit of the landlords, of course. Thousands of them simply bribed local officials to enlarge their holdings in the government records. The result was that millions of peasant families who knew nothing about the new laws suddenly found themselves living on someone else’s land and owing rent after perhaps centuries of farming it for themselves.”
“Outrageous,” grunted Schilling.
“Yes,” answered Weiskopf. “I often wonder, you know, if the Chinese people are really better off with their shiny new republic.”
“Not so shiny, I think,” said Schilling. “Pretty tarnished, actually. Such corruption would never be tolerated in Germany.”
* * *
As it transpired, it cost forty silver dollars to persuade a minor bureaucrat in the land registry office in Zhengzhou to confirm the land was not private property, although it took him three days to rummage his way through the welter of files and papers filling his office to overflowing. Weiskopf used the time to assemble a crew of laborers and arrange for an old army truck to convey them — at prodigal expense — to the excavation site.
“Everything costs a fortune,” Schilling grumbled, as he and Weiskopf, both in brown overalls and broad hats, led the way out of the city in the smoking Ford.
“Everyone has to get what he can, when he can,” said Weiskopf, with a shrug, “because the future is highly uncertain. The Guomindang has only a tenuous hold on government, the Japanese have had a strong and well-equipped army in Manchuria for the last eighteen months, so God only knows what they intend to do. North China could muster very little resistance to a Japanese invasion because the region is still recovering from what they call the time of the warlords, Wu Peifu and all his cronies, which devastated much of the countryside.
“Many people do expect an invasion,” Schilling said, and Weiskopf nodded, slowing the truck behind a group of men pushing flat-decked wooden handcarts and engaging loudly in animated conversation. Weiskopf pressed the horn repeatedly to move them aside.
“The Sino-Japanese War ended in eighteen-ninety-five,” he went on, changing gears as the truck picked up speed again, “but China and Japan are still mortal enemies. And on top of it all, there’s the communists down in the southeast.”
“That rabble won’t amount to anything,” snorted Schilling. “They’ll be like all communists everywhere. Thugs, that’s all they are. Leaderless thugs, intent on troublemaking and destruction all in the name of what they call working people. They know nothing else. They’re poison, that’s what the Reds are.”
Weiskopf had heard these outbursts before.
“Don’t be too sure,” he said, as the Ford crashed into, and then out of, a large pothole. “I hear there’s increasing support for a couple of them who seem to be very shrewd. The foremost is a certain Mao Zedong. Calls himself a peasant, but his father was actually a small-time landowner and sort of gentleman-farmer. This Mao fellow has the support of an influential young intellectual by the name of Zhou Enlai. He’s an historian, I understand, and studied in Paris, no less. He and Mao met when they worked together as teachers in Canton in the mid-twenties.”
Schilling stared stone-faced at the road ahead as Weiskopf came to his point. “So…in the face of all that, what would you do if you were an ordinary citizen trying to stay alive and keep your family fed, hmm?”
“All right,” said Schilling, a little morosely, “I see what you mean in the case of ordinary people but having to bribe government employees really galls me. After all, damn it, they’re getting paid for what they do, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are,” said Weiskopf, “but they’re paid precious little. And when it comes to officials, there’s a separate issue. The problem is that for the last two thousand years, men who held positions in the civil service were barely paid anything at all and were expected to make their actual living through what we would term corrupt practices.” He grinned, adding, “So by asking for a little something extra, the officials today are simply honoring an age-old tradition and keeping it alive.”
“Well,” said Schilling, “that’s as may be, but that sort of corruption should have been eradicated years ago when the old imperial system was turfed out.”
Weiskopf, concentrating on his driving for the moment as the truck threaded its way through a huge flock of clamorous white ducks being chivvied across the road in a flurry of feathers by three bare-footed young girls, said nothing, and Schilling clenched his fist before declaring, “China has no strong leader, that’s her real trouble, Aaron. She needs a man like Adolph Hitler who can get rid of the Reds, the racketeers, the profiteers, and the left-wing agitators. You know what I mean. The lawless elements and those who want to drag us all down to their own dead level.”
Weiskopf felt as if he were in a beer hall in Munich or reading a Hitler speech in a pro-Nazi newspaper. It was not a pleasant sensation.
“China needs a leader who can damn well get things done!” Schilling finished.
“Such as getting the trains to run on time?” asked Weiskopf, with a sideways glance at Schilling.
“Well, they sure as hell don’t run on time here now,” Schilling snapped, in a tone suggesting there was nothing more to be said.
Weiskopf had long suspected Schilling’s National Socialist proclivities. He noted Schilling had made no mention of Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism, but like many others, Weiskopf suspected Hitler would soon go too far for the moderates in Germany. Once that happened, they would throw him out; send him back into obscurity where he and other such lunatics belonged, and men like Schilling would then have to hitch their wagons to a more practical, less opportunistic and demagogic, star. Germany needed more substance and less sound than the Nazis were offering, although he could not deny their current popularity.
Weiskopf drew the truck to a stop at the side of the dirt track, glad of the chance to end that particular conversation.
“And here we are,” he announced.
It was mid-morning by now and the sun was getting hot as it mounted towards its zenith. Tools and equipment were unloaded by the laborers, and then all eyes turned to Weiskopf. They watched him as he walked this way and that around the site carefully studying the terrain, all the while rubbing his chin as was his habit when deep in thought.
“All right, Eduard,” he said at last, “I think our best chance is to situate the test pit where artifacts have been most recently recovered. I see nothing here to suggest any other course of action. There is no evidence of buildings, walls or foundations to be seen, so if there is anything here it’s not showing itself on the surface, that’s certain.”
Schilling agreed, and four stakes were driven into the ground under Weiskopf’s close supervision. Thin white cord was then strung between them to delineate an area of ground three meters square around the place Lai claimed to have found the carved jade. The workmen were shown how to clear the ground of weeds and tufts of grass while disturbing the soil as little as possible, and then Schilling and two others who had worked with Weiskopf in previous seasons, began the systematic excavation.
It was painstaking work. Some of the laborers shook their heads, wondering why they were not allowed to use picks and spades to get the job done more quickly.
“These foreign devils with their round eyes and big noses will get nowhere like this,” averred one of them, forgetting that both Weiskopf and Schilling spoke Chinese.
Small flat trowels of the sort used by bricklayers were the only digging tools used, and if anything appeared, the soil was brushed away from it with a small paintbrush while Weiskopf took photographs and kept meticulous notes on its location and depth in the slowly deepening pit. Nothing conclusive appeared, however. Objects which could have been artifacts turned out to be pieces of ordinary wood, naturally chipped stone, or broken bits of recent pottery. Short-lived excitement was caused by Schilling’s discovery of a rust-encrusted arrowhead which might have been Shang in origin had it not proved to be made of steel. Its presence was interesting, but nothing more.
Several of the workmen laughed, asking why so much care was being taken over such odd things, but they dutifully carried away the buckets of soil the excavators filled, wondering, no doubt, if anything truly valuable would ever be uncovered.
“Even if it is,” Weiskopf heard one of them say, “at the speed they dig we shall not live to see it.”
Weiskopf and Schilling, absorbed in their work, spared no time to explain. Patience was paramount, but they had both dug too many unproductive pits to let their imaginations run away with them.
It had been necessary to promise the laborers lunch as well as money, so Weiskopf engaged the services of the cook he had employed on many previous occasions. This ancient and wrinkled little man, seventy-five if he was a day, and completely without teeth, set up a makeshift kitchen under a tarpaulin rigged between two stunted trees. Chattering with irrepressible cheerfulness, regardless of whether anyone was listening, he produced an excellent meal of rice, chicken, and vegetables using nothing but an oil stove and a large wok. Schilling and his two assistants rested briefly, smoked a cigarette or two, and then returned to the pit, by then barely twenty centimeters deep. Hardly had they begun, however, when Schilling let out a whoop of excitement.
“What is it?” shouted Weiskopf, hurrying to where Schilling knelt in one corner of the excavation.
“Bricks,” answered Schilling, wielding his brush to reveal two sunbaked bricks laid side by side. They were old, and obviously not there by natural occurrence.
“Are they a floor?” asked Weiskopf, thinking this may be nothing more than the remains of an ancient dwelling or temple, but Schilling shook his head.
“No, they are not level. They slope to the left, going deeper. And they extend beyond the pit wall as well. Right under where you’re standing, as a matter of fact, but I can’t yet tell how far they go.”
“All right,” said Weiskopf, trying to appear calm, but not wholly succeeding. Was it a ramp? he wondered. Bronze age tombs belonging to important people often exhibited entrance ramps. “We’ll follow where they lead and see where we end up.”
By sunset they had exposed half a meter of brick pathway nearly four meters wide and were following it half a meter deeper into the ground.
“It’s an entrance ramp all right,” said Schilling, and Weiskopf agreed.
“Yes, it certainly looks like it. It’s a tomb in all probability, but whose is it and has it been disturbed?”
Weiskopf felt the familiar surge of excitement he always experienced when excavating a new site, but as he stood looking at the rows of carefully laid bricks exposed to view for the first time in millennia, he became conscious of something else as well. He did not know whether to call it a premonition or a mere feeling, but he was somehow sure this find would be of greater significance than any of his others. Pushing these thoughts aside with some difficulty, he concentrated on what was before him.
Assuming it is a tomb, there is no evidence so far to suggest it is a royal one. But no matter who might be buried here, if tomb robbers have been here already, there may be little, or nothing, left.
As he watched Schilling and the others at work, he studied the newly exposed path. There was no doubt the ramp was uncommonly wide, and the bricks of an uncommonly fine quality.
“Da Yi, Aaron?” asked Schilling with a smile, obviously knowing what was going through his mind, and Weiskopf shrugged.
“Who can tell?” His casual attitude and off-hand words belied the turmoil of his thoughts.
Could it be Da Yi after all these years?
Weiskopf and Schilling ate their evening meal sitting cross-legged on the ground, their kerosene lanterns creating luminous pools of pale-yellow radiance around them in the starlit darkness. The light inevitably attracted a teeming host of moths, gnats, and other flying insects, to the point they both lit their pipes in hopes the smoke would keep the swarm away, which it did not. They soon retreated to their tent where they discussed and edited Weiskopf’s notes, and by nine o’clock they were rolled in blankets and sound asleep.
Rising with the sun, Weiskopf left Schilling to continue exposing the brick ramp, while he returned to Zhengzhou. As he maneuvered the clattering, smoking old Ford around and between the pedestrians, carts, and other vehicles on the narrow country road, he pondered the numerous problems associated with running the dig, which he was now convinced would be a full-scale excavation. How many new laborers should he hire? What additional tools and supplies would be needed? And the overarching question of what the budget would bear loomed before him. There was never enough money. His frustration grew as he drove. If this was a major tomb discovery, its excavation would be expensive, as would transporting the artifact assemblage back to Leipzig. Why did the university governors always expect him to make bricks without straw? Now fuming with exasperation, he rounded a bend in the road.
Damnation!
He swerved violently to avoid a bullock cart. Calm down, for heaven’s sake, he instructed himself, severely. Watch where you’re going, or you won’t be excavating anything.
In Zhengzhou he enlisted the aid of Mr. Wu, the owner of the guesthouse, who had become a firm friend after so many years. Wu took his quiet way into the labyrinthine streets and alleys of the ancient city, where he located twenty reliable men Weiskopf could safely hire as ordinary laborers, as well as four strong-looking ex-soldiers for whose honesty he personally vouched, to serve as night watchmen. At the same time, Wu’s wife, a stridulent harridan, took the list Weiskopf had brought from the cook and departed to do shrill battle with the street and market stall vendors she habitually referred to as cheats, liars, and crooks. Weiskopf sent telegrams to the departments of archeology at Beijing University, Qinghua University, and Nankai University asking for volunteers from amongst their graduate students. If this was a major tomb, and all indications were that it probably was, he would need as many trained hands and eyes as he could acquire. He then sent a telegram to Professor Irwin Bergdorf, head of the archeology department at the University of Leipzig.
April 20 1933 Zhengzhou China
Excavating large bronze-age tomb stop Perhaps royal stop Will advise soonest stop Weiskopf
That should keep the old boy happy, he thought, as he left the telegraph office having handed over two dollars to send the wires, and another five to ensure they actually would be sent.
Following that, he drove back to the guesthouse where Wu had assembled the new recruits for his inspection. Surveying the men standing in two ranks before him, he told them they would be picked up at dawn two days hence, and anyone not on time would be left behind without question. They would be paid at the end of each week, and if any man proved lazy, he would be dismissed forthwith and be obliged to walk back to Zhengzhou.
“There is one final thing,” and making his voice harsh and threatening, he said, “If any man attempts to steal anything we unearth in our work, no matter how small it may be, he will be turned over to the police immediately and severely punished. This, I solemnly promise you.”
Some men bowed, others merely nodded, as he bent a meaningful stare on them to emphasize his words. He had had trouble with theft in the past and was not about to risk it now. He derived no satisfaction from the thought of men being flogged into insensibility with bamboo canes — on the contrary, he considered it a barbarous practice — but such was the punishment invariably prescribed for thieves. However, he was not prepared to lose precious artifacts to light-fingered casual laborers, and so he repeated, “Severely punished. Remember that, all of you.”
He and Wu then ate a fine dinner together in the company of Wu’s strident wife and their five children before retiring to bed, tired, but excited and happy.
Returning to the telegraph office the next morning at ten o’clock he was told by a sad-faced and apologetic little man in a creased and stained dark blue suit that there were no messages for him. However, upon his receiving three Big Heads, his mood at once brightened and he was miraculously able to find five telegrams which he had forgotten about.
“Forgive my failing memory, good sir.” This with a self-deprecating smile and an obsequious bow.
Standing outside in the warm sunshine on the steps of the office with the tumult of pedestrians, cars, trucks, carts, and rickshaws all contending for room on the road before him, he read that ten graduate students would be on their way to Zhengzhou by train that evening, arriving at six o’clock tomorrow morning, and could he send someone to meet them and conduct them to the site?
Good, he thought, tearing open the final wire and reading.
Understood stop Stay within budget stop Bergdorf
What’s he think I’m going to do, Weiskopf fumed, run up a huge debt and ask the department to pay it for me? Pausing for a moment, he was chagrined to recall that he had actually done that once several years ago, thereby incurring the ire of the university’s governors expressed to him in a strongly worded letter of reprimand. Their anger, however, paled into insignificance when compared to the wrath of Herr Professor Dr. Irwin Bergdorf.
After procuring many more trowels, several small spades, two dozen brushes, and eight hundred paper bags of varying sizes, he collected the provisions Wu’s wife had purchased and packed and drove back to the excavation site, arriving in the late afternoon.
He saw at once Schilling had made good progress. The upper extremity of the ramp was fully exposed, measuring a little under six meters in width. Schilling and his small team had also uncovered two meters of its length, at which point it was just over a meter below the datum line, a horizontal string set about three centimeters above the surface of the ground to serve as the uniform level from which all depths were measured. This method removed the inconsistencies inevitably resulting if measurements were taken from the uneven and undulating surface of the ground itself.
“It’s been disturbed, I’m afraid, Aaron,” Schilling reported, with a disappointed expression on his bearded face, as he took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You can see it.”
He pointed to the wall of the pit at the base of which the paved ramp disappeared underground, and Weiskopf saw immediately he was right. His heart sank. On the far right-hand end of the wall, the color of the soil changed from dark brown to pale gray. It contained much more sand than the original earth, and it was clear someone, hundreds of years ago perhaps, had burrowed his way down the ramp. There was a chance, albeit a slim one, that the unknown vandal had given up before he reached the far end of the ramp and had not plundered the actual burial, but Weiskopf put very little faith in that idea. In any event, whether he reached the tomb or not, he had left his tunnel to be filled in by natural means. Weiskopf shook his head, bitter disappointment choking any words he may have wished to say.