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By now Brian and Catherine were more than just friends, but Stuart Miller’s pah others at the site had painted him as an outdoorsman, it turned out that his desire for solitude had been born out of the necessity of putting some distance between himself and Catherine On weekends, he headed into the hills He wasn’t a great artist, but he drehat he saw During the week he scouted out different places until he settled on the little stretch of beach where his belongings were later found

August 7—Today I finally et to my beach Their land is poor The son and his wife aren’t educated They’re the first people I’ve ner passing by your door isn’t worth the energy when you’re practically starving to death Just past their house is the trail I take to get down here It’s so quiet you can hear pebbles rolling along the riverbed I can see the Unlocked Gates Gorge across the way Partway up the hill is the Beheading Dragon Platforon Pillar Next Sunday I’ll try to get over there

A couple of days later:

I passed the Wu house again today The old hter-in-law is very shy Today she ashing clothes in the river near where I have my lunch At first she wouldn’t answer ht a fox spirit had stolen her tongue She said my accent was atrocious Actually she said I was as hard to understand as a river turtle

As pro farther east

Explored the Unlocked Gates Gorge today On hter-in-law, and she explained sor

aphy It seeon left his ho The creature got lost, becae caused mountains to cruoddess threw a string of pearls into the air, which turned into a rope that bound the dragon to the pillar The goddess then ordered Da Yu to behead the dragon on the platform Wu Taitai pointed out the coiled shape of striated stone where the dragon can be seen Although she is a Society

Toward the end of su for a couple of days and wanted to go caving, but for some reason Brian balked “So, but I’ht him back to Catherine

The prank that she had cooked up about the Nine Tripods had backfired Lily was co tripod She needed someone to retrieve it from the whirlpool, and that someone was Brian “As if,” he wrote By this tio-between between Lily and Wu Huadong; her paye difference to the Wu family Notably, fro his travel up and down the river would do to his aspirations for beco an All-Patriotic Society lieutenant In fact, David realized, Brian hadn’t written about Xiao Da or the Society since his entry about the Wu girl being a follower

Brian’s last teekends had been spent literally underground as he explored local caves Reeht after one descent, he finally noticed what Hulan had seen on her first day at the dig The site and the surrounding area were uncommonly barren On September 9, he wrote that he had an idea about the land and ot back to Seattle His last entry before leaving China read:

No one would believe in a thousand years how I got horeat embellishment to her stories Maybe I’ll tell her when I come back next year I could make some real money

David closed his eyes for a iven hilad he had it, because he was sure he had more pieces of the puzzle than Hulan did, but he orried about her He’d gotten this far since he’d left her at the Three Gorges Daation?

David took a deep breath and picked up the story with Brian’s return to the University of Washington He devoted hi for a new Miller Fellowship His journal evolved fro a place where he kept track of his research for his master’s thesis and future dissertation He studied early jade, in particular bis and chimes These shapes were the sarove’s last night Brian had been looking at these pieces a year ago!

He then began an exaui and a ruyi David bolted upright as he read that last word Here again, Brian was interested in an object o that had catapulted David into this horrible situation As usual, Brian stuck with an academic approach as he described the differences Both objects shared similar inspirations and aspirations; both were considered scepters But as tiuis— usually in the foriven as “passports” for inments and had been used by court officials to hold in front of their mouths to deflect their breath away from the eed centuries later froi form, it was used as a an to make ruyis in other iven as iifts for nuptials and in honor of deeds well done Today the back scratcher with its fingerlike phalanges was a direct—though plebeian—descendant of the ruyi

Despite what the history books said, Brian had a very different take on the gui and ruyi In archaeological terui had to have developed after the ruyi, which had its source in a natural eleain Brian went back to some obscure scholarly debate about Yu’s “dark-colored stone” Had it been given at the beginning of Yu’s quest? Or was it, as some scholars believed, an object that Yu found in his travels—an artifact so precious and ren? Was the stone actually a stone? Couldn’t it be interpreted as so dark and hard, like a petrified mushroom? “I think this could connect to what I found in the earth around Site 518,” Brian wrote “I need to take this up with Angela but not until I’ her hopes up needlessly”