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Hulan left the at the loudmouth’s wickedness She was unsure of what to do next She wandered down the hill to the pit wher

e Catherine Miller and Annabel Quinby labored Hulan spent the next three hours scraping at the ground andsmall talk as the rain cascaded down around them

She did as instructed but kept most of her attention on the way Catherine and Annabel interacted Annabel was more senior, but when Catherine uncovered a shard of pottery, their conversation seemed to be between equals The piece turned out to be just a couple of centin could still be read Catherine told Hulan that these designs were one of the things that archaeologists and linguists looked for when trying to raphs that composed the earliest archaic characters of what eventually becae

This conversation re Stuart had said out at the daht it up now “Your father told me that Brian found some pieces here with motifs that were different from those typically used by the Ba,” Hulan said “What did he mean by that?”

“The Ba had very distinctive works of art,” Catherine explained “They made weapons and cohly developed artistic, though warlike, culture The Ba’s axes were of particular interest to Brian They were made from jade or bronze, but they were similar in shape and style to the musical chimes found at Yellow River sites This anically He thought the shape had been transported—and its original use changed—from a musical instrument of the Yellow River peoples to a weapon”

Annabel, who’d been listening to the exchange, looked up and added, “But how did that transfor of the twenty-first century, we’re secluded within this gorge So how did the Ba come to interact with the other more established cultures on the Yellow River? Why did the Ba need to be so warlike, and how did their artistry develop?”

“Your Four Mysteries,” Hulan said As on her first day here, Hulan had picked up so sticky on her hands It had to be some property in the soil She thrust her hands out into the rain, rinsed them off, and wiped them on her pants

“Two of them anyway,” Annabel responded “Mystery One: How did the Three Gorges, which actually insulate through their geography, become a cultural watershed? And Mystery Three: What caused certain artistic styles to take hold here and continue for millennia? Brian was profoundly interested in those questions, which is why it’s all thethat he chose to take artifacts from the site rather than let us study them in context”

“What context, Annabel?” Catherine asked “You know Brian’s pieces didn’t come from here”

“You’re right as always, my dear,” the older woman admitted

Hulan was thoroughly confused “I thought you said that the ax Brian found was a Ba artifact”

The toh she were an imbecile

“Absolutely not! It looked like a Yellow River chime,” Catherine explained

“The jade bis weren’t Ba artifacts either,” Annabel added “The Ba didn’t have an emperor in residence ould have needed to commune with Heaven”

“Most important,” Catherine picked up, “this is a subsurface site Now consider the ruyi How long do you think a dried mushroom would last under the soil before it deteriorated?”