The Temple Mount Code

by Charles Brokaw

  ‘Why have you come to our temple?’ Shamar’s excellent English had a British accent.

  ‘Seeking knowledge.’ Lourds sat cross-legged and felt the heat from the fireplace melting into his body. The cold that had leached into his bones seemed like it was finally leaving.

  ‘You’re not here to investigate our faith, Professor Lourds. Your soul is too restless to travel quietly through this life.’

  ‘No, we’re not here about your faith. We came hoping to get information about this temple.’

  ‘What do you wish to know?’

  ‘First, let me give you some information.’ Lourds brought out the picture of the tortoiseshell map and explained how he’d found it and how they’d located the temple.

  ‘An impressive story.’ Shamar seemed genuinely interested. ‘I had no idea of the temple’s history. It was already here when the first monks arrived. Our histories record no origin of this place.’

  ‘It was like this?’

  ‘Much as you see it now. Few changes have been made. Ours is a simple faith. We live within the world as it is and don’t seek to change it to fit our desires. Monks come here to strip away the cares and concerns of the outside world so that we might become better teachers when we reenter that world. Our time here is spent in study and mastering our spirits.’

  ‘Why is it called the Temple of the Scholar’s Rock?’

  ‘The temple was named so in honor of the many scholar’s rocks found here.’

  ‘Uh, Professor Lourds.’

  Lourds peered over his shoulder at Rory.

  ‘Maybe you could explain what a scholar’s rock is. You know, for the audience back home?’

  ‘Young man.’ Shamar lifted his voice.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  The monk smiled beatifically. ‘Would you care to join us?’

  ‘Uh, no. I’m good right here. Thanks.’

  ‘If you would learn something, you must go to the feet of one who knows and talk, not bellow from the shadows.’

  Rory scratched his head, then came forward reluctantly and sat cross-legged on one of the rugs.

  Lourds answered the question. ‘A scholar’s rock is also known as a viewing stone. They’ve been around for a long time, but they were brought to prominence in the Song Dynasty. The Tang Dynasty defined the four main visual qualities of a scholar’s stone: thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling. I’ll give you the Cantonese words for those things later.’

  ‘What do you do with a scholar’s stone?’

  Shamar laughed.

  Lourds smiled. ‘Well, you appreciate it.’

  Rory’s brow furrowed. ‘Appreciate it? A rock? This isn’t like a pet rock, is it? You aren’t after having me on, are you?’

  ‘No, not at all. Generally a scholar’s rock is used for decoration in a garden. They have interesting shapes, holes, and perforations. The texture of the rocks is smooth. The smoother the better. The preferred method of getting them is simply finding them, but sometimes artisans helped nature along by cutting stones into interesting shapes and immersing them in running water or a lake so the sharp edges would wear away.’

  Rory’s brow furrowed. ‘That would take years.’

  ‘Of course it took years. But the texture was prized. A lot of scholar’s stones come from lakes, such as from Taihu Lake, and they’re used in gardens. Once the Chinese started using scholar’s rocks, the Koreans picked the art form up in their country, as did the Japanese in their suiseki art.’

  ‘The lesson, you see, is to learn to find and appreciate art in nature.’ Shamar nodded in satisfaction. ‘Now let me show you the cavern that gave this place its name.’ With the easy grace of a child, he stood and walked toward one of the doors.

  Ang took down one of the oil lanterns and fell into step with him.

  Caught off guard, Lourds quickly scrambled to his feet, gave Hu a hand, and followed.

  11

  Scholar’s Rock Temple

  Himalaya Mountains

  People’s Republic of China

  July 26, 2011

  From the interview chamber, Lourds followed Shamar and Ang down a twisting passageway into the mountain. Lourds took a mini-Maglite from his backpack to add to the glow given of Ang’s lantern. As the cold from the mountain surrounded him, he regretted leaving his coat behind. He’d assumed that since the monks hadn’t bundled up, where they were going wouldn’t be cold.

  Hu slapped at his upper arms. ‘Nothing like a brisk walk, eh?’ His breath puffed out in small white clouds. ‘Especially after the long trek up a mountainside.’

  ‘I could have done with some more heat. And I honestly thought we were going to bed soon.’ Lourds yawned and shined his light around. There were no tool marks on the wall, which meant the passageway was natural. ‘I have to admit, I’m looking forward to sleeping in a warm bed.’

  ‘So am I.’

  They continued down for several more minutes before the passageway widened into another cavern. When Lourds entered the new room, he saw dozens of scholar’s rocks standing before him. They looked like a massive chess game set out to be played.

  Stunned, he wandered among them, drawn by the enigma they presented. Nearly all of them were taller than he was and weighed several hundred pounds. He ran his fingers along many, discovering the same smooth texture.

  Amazed, he turned back to Shamar, careful to keep the bright light out of the old monk’s eyes. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘One hundred sixteen.’ Shemar stood with his arms in the sleeves of his robe.

  ‘Why are they here?’

  ‘No one knows. This is one of the things the monks that arrive here for training are told to contemplate. We are still awaiting an answer.’

  Overwhelmed, Lourds walked through the forest of stone figures. Many looked like people, the rudimentary shapes showing men, women, and children. He touched oval faces that held only the hint of features, eyes, nose, and mouth. Ears were conspicuously absent. The majority of the outer ring of statues depicted common people.

  ‘This is a farmer. See his hoe?’ Lourds traced the image of the hoe in bas-relief along the rock.

  ‘All I see is a rock.’ Rory stood on the other side of the large stone.

  ‘That is because you choose to see with only your eyes.’ Shamar’s voice echoed over the chamber, and Lourds knew the old man had chosen his spot because the acoustics in the cavern allowed him to be heard like that. Upon further inspection, Lourds saw the small platform cut from the stone floor. The area had been clearly marked.

  ‘Who chose that spot?’ Lourds pointed his flashlight beam over the low rise.

  ‘The speaker’s post was already inscribed when we got here.’

  ‘Look! I found a pig!’ Over to the left, Thompson pointed excitedly.

  The lump of rock was definitely piggish in shape, with a snout and huge hindquarters.

  ‘Here’s a tortoise!’ Gloria Chen strode through the figures and laid her hand on a low figure that was unmistakably that.

  Lourds made his way to her, thinking that perhaps the tortoise would offer a clue as the other one had in Jiahu. The scholar’s rock did indeed look like a tortoise, but instead of having a high, rounded back, it had a flat one. Still, the head, feet, and tail were all in the appropriate places. The creature even seemed to be smiling.

  He got down on one knee and played his flashlight beam on the tortoise’s underside. Gloria joined him, adding her beam to his. He hardly noticed the cold, even though every breath they breathed plumed out white. Her glasses were slightly fogged.

  ‘You think there’s another clue here, don’t you?’ Gloria didn’t act angry now, but she seemed determined to find whatever might be there first.

  Lourds smiled. Competition was something he knew all about. He flicked his light back and forth.

  Unfortunately, nothing appeared to be there.

  ‘Maybe something’s hidden inside. Maybe there’s a hidden space.’ Gloria crawled under the massive t
ortoise and started pushing at the rock.

  ‘You’ll want to be careful under there. This thing has got to weigh a ton at least.’

  ‘I got here first. If anything’s here to be found, I’m going to find it.’ Gloria shoved herself farther under the tortoise while on her back.

  Lourds flattened himself as well and played his light over the tortoise. ‘It would be poetic symmetry if this tortoise did, in fact, yield another clue, but the likelihood of that is small.’

  ‘You’re just trying to get me out of here, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, but I don’t think this tortoise is going to tell us anything.’ Lourds shoved himself out from under the tortoise and started to look around.

  ‘This is a woman.’ Professor Hu flashed his beam over a smaller figure with a thin woman’s gentle curves a few rocks over.

  ‘She’s carrying a fan.’ Hu flicked his beam down the rock’s side and revealed the familiar fan shape in the woman’s hands.

  ‘A fan?’ Rory walked through the figures to join them.

  ‘A winnowing fan.’ Lourds touched the stone fan and felt its sharp edges. ‘The Peligang people, who lived in Jiahu along the Yellow River in 7000 BC, raised foxtail millet and rice to eat. After the millet was harvested and threshed, the grain was separated from the chaff by tossing it into the air. The wind blew the chaff away while the grain fell back into the fan.’

  ‘Uh, Professor Lourds.’

  Lourds looked up at the BBC reporter.

  ‘I’m going to need you to repeat that in front of the camera.’ Rory waved the cameraman over.

  Sighing, Lourds shook his head.

  ‘Look, whenever you feel like you’re going to pontificate or go on about something, maybe you could give me a sign. It would save us both a lot of time and effort.’

  Hu chuckled. ‘Unfortunately, a professor is at the mercy of his own knowledge and interests. Poor Thomas never knows when he’s going to launch into a presentation till he finds himself in the middle of it.’

  ‘Rory.’ Lourds clapped the young reporter on the shoulder. ‘You’re going to need to be a little more responsible for getting your material. I’m not going to stop at every moment and repeat myself. Take notes. When you get a spare moment, research things. Learn things. Trust me, you’ll be much better at your job. Everyone needs an education, and most people never realize how responsible they are for their own edification. Do you understand?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Good.’ Lourds started to walk away.

  ‘However, could you do the fan thing again?’

  Deeper into the maze of scholar’s rocks, the sculptures – and Lourds couldn’t help thinking of them that way because so many of the figures couldn’t have merely been found – changed significantly. The difference was immediate and disturbing.

  ‘These men are armed.’ Hu seemed rattled by the discovery as well.

  Lourds played his beam over a large man carrying what looked like a stone axe, with a short haft jutting up from the man’s big fist, and an oblong rock at the end.

  ‘Those people living at Jiahu were peaceful, Thomas. We’ve found no evidence of wars among the bodies we’ve disinterred.’

  ‘Only a little over three hundred graves have been opened. There may be surprises awaiting archaeologists. The big question is why these people, if they’re indeed the same people who left the tortoise in the grave, traveled this far from their home.’ Lourds moved to the next warrior figure, a man with a club held in both hands over his head.

  ‘The flood could have done it. From all indications, the original settlement was surrounded by a moat they doubtless used to irrigate the millet and rice. But the Yellow River – China’s Pride and China’s Sorrow, in equal parts – has a habit of changing its course. During one of those changes, it flooded Jiahu.’

  Lourds knew the process. Loess, formed of wind-borne erosion, filled the river with silt, sand, and clay that became naturally occurring dams solidified by calcium carbonate. The changes took hundreds and even thousands of years, but they occurred. The Yellow River, because of its elevated riverbed, was especially problematic.

  ‘So did these warriors attack these people and cause them to migrate?’ Lourds shined his beam into the nightmarish face of the club-wielding attacker. Less attention had been paid to the man’s features, and he looked like a cipher. ‘Or did these people attack the immigrants on their way to this place?’

  ‘This cavern tells a story.’ Lourds stood beside Shamar and looked out over the chamber.

  The old monk smiled. ‘Yes, we believe so, too.’

  ‘The people who founded this place were desperate.’ Lourds pointed his light at figures that seemed to cower from the approaching warriors. ‘They’d lost their homes and were searching for another.’

  He was slightly distracted by Rory’s cameraman aiming the bright light in his face, but he persevered. The footage with the cave all around him would look terrific in the documentary. He’d chosen to stand on the speaking area, so his practiced voice thundered inside the cavern.

  ‘But they couldn’t live here. Not without a food source.’ Lourds looked out over the scholar’s rocks and contemplated the problem. ‘Then why choose to live here if it was such a hardship?’

  He answered his own question. ‘Because they wanted to leave a message and tell their story.’ Lourds was convinced that was the truth. ‘Cultures want to leave something of themselves behind. Remember, these people had to have known the Yellow River overflowed their countryside. Look at the side of the cave.’

  The cameraman swung around to survey the cavern walls. Hu had been the first to find the tool markings on the wall. Once they’d seen the first ones, the others had been found in quick order.

  ‘These people inscribed the river on the walls. Those are river currents.’ Lourds felt certain the wavy lines could be nothing else. ‘The river, Mother River, had been important to their community, until she turned vicious and swallowed their homes.’ He took a dramatic breath, the way he did sometimes to cement an idea in one of his classes. ‘Then they came here to leave their story.’

  ‘But what happened to them after that?’ Rory stood at the forefront of the crowd.

  Lourds shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Getting food here would have been hard. Enough to feed a large group, and I’m certain this was a large community, probably more than a hundred people, would have been even harder. They would have had to haul it in, or trade for it with the Sherpa or other people who traversed the mountains.’

  ‘Why not go somewhere else? Somewhere easier?’

  ‘All the arable lands, the lands where a people could live with relative comfort and assurance of a crop, would have been already inhabited around these mountains.’ Suddenly Lourds realized something else. ‘They knew they were dying. They knew their culture was going to be erased as surely as the Yellow River had erased their homeland.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘Either they would die out from disease or a low birth rate, or they would be assimilated by stronger, more successful cultures.’

  Rory focused on Lourds. ‘How long did it take for those people to make all these statues?’

  ‘Scholar’s rocks, not statues. And the answer to that is decades. Generations.’

  ‘They spent all that time looking for rocks that looked like people? Then hauled them to this cave? That sounds like a lot of work.’

  ‘I’m sure it was, but one thing the Himalayas has besides a lot of snow is a lot of rocks.’

  Everyone laughed.

  But even as he said that, Lourds knew that wasn’t the true answer. It was a possible answer – but not the correct one.

  12

  Schloss Volker

  Vienna, Austria

  July 27, 2011

  ‘Will you be needing the car any more tonight, Herr Von Volker?’

  ‘Yes, Hans. Keep it ready.’ Von Volker strode past his liveried chauffeur and up the steps leading to his ancestral home.

 
Schloss Volker was a beautiful estate, built in the late 18th century by Erich Von Volker, Klaus’s ancestor.

  Erich had built his empire on two fronts. First, through transatlantic shipping and slave trade in Africa, backed by profitable gold and diamond mining on the continent. On the second front, Erich Von Volker had maintained a private standing army of mercenaries that protected his assets and fought wars for hire. Some of them had even fought for the Americans during the Revolutionary War, while Erich sold the young army weapons. He’d solidified his holdings through political favors and power.

  Things hadn’t changed much. Von Volker still maintained a few mining prospects in Africa, but the profits weren’t as good as in the past. Getting gold and blood diamonds out these days was extremely difficult. If he’d chosen to live in South Africa, he could have lived well.

  But his heart was here, in Austria, his ancestral homeland. Also contained deep inside him was the burning desire of one day reuniting Austria with Germany to make a large country that would successfully stand against the Jew-loving nations of the world. Not only reuniting the two countries, but leading them into a glorious new age as well.

  The estate grounds around the schloss were immaculately maintained. The grass was green, flowers bloomed every day, and the fountains ran pure water.

  Many other men, lesser men, would have been satisfied with what he already possessed. Von Volker was not. He wanted to be the head of a unified Germany and Austria that he dreamed of every day; he would accept nothing less. And once he’d accomplished that, he would use the newly allied nation to lead the rest of the squabbling, disjointed European countries as well. Either they would fall in line from economic pressure the new power could bring to bear, or else there were other ways of gaining their allegiance …

  He walked up the steps, where the houseman held the large, carved wooden door open for him. Alice was not there, and that mildly irritated Von Volker. If he hadn’t still been smarting from the casual disdain evidenced by Colonel Davari over dinner, he probably wouldn’t have thought twice about her absence. She tended to be interested in her own pursuits these days, but she hadn’t yet grown the guts to take a lover.