Dragon Bones by Lisa See

people used those dark holes in the earth not only as means of artistic or religious expression but also to record their daily lives—the animals brought down in a hunt or the battles won. People were leaving history on those walls even before written language was invented. Unfortunately, although we continue to look, we have yet to find any artifacts in the Site 518 caves. Primarily we scrape at the ground in the pits, looking for artifacts, looking for the past, looking for civilization, looking for the lives of the people who came before us.”
    “What exactly are you looking for?” David asked.
    Ma sighed, then said, “Thanks to your Indiana Jones, many people think that archaeologists are treasure hunters. We aren’t. Our group—archaeologists interested specifically in the Yangzi watershed—has four questions that fascinate and perplex us. We call them the Four Mysteries, and I’m sure you’ll hear about them at lunch, although you never know. The people on our team have many interests.” He quirked his head. “How much do you know about archaeology, Attorney Stark?”
    “Your mandate is to prove five thousand years of continuous culture.”
    “Real culture, as opposed to a few people huddled around a fire carving crude weapons from stone,” Ma said, then motioned for them to sit on some large boulders. “For years scholars suspected that people may have lived in the gorges during the Stone Age, but it wasn’t until this final push before inundation that Paleolithic sites dating from 50,000 to 12,000 B.C. were located. We’ve also found Neolithic sites, one of which is right here beneath our Ba excavations. The ceramics that we’ve uncovered are stylistically different from those found outside the gorges. We think this means that the Qutang Gorge must have been some sort of cultural divide. So Mystery One is why did societies in the Three Gorges area—and the Qutang Gorge in particular—develop so independently? Mystery Two: the Chu Mausoleum….”
    Hulan tuned out his words and tried to imagine Brian McCarthy in this landscape. Site 518 was far larger than she’d imagined, extending up and down the hillside. The land was terraced, but whatever cultivation had occurred here was long gone, leaving only dirt and rocks. Peasants crisscrossed the dusty terrain with wheelbarrows, while others—Chinese students and foreigners—squatted in pits sheltered by tarpaulin canopies.
    The longer Hulan sat here, the more she could catch snippets of conversations drifting down the hill to them. The day workers spoke only Chinese, while the students and foreigners spoke the international language of science—English. From across the way she heard an older man—American—say to a young woman with long bare legs, “You’re running out of time. If you want that to happen, then you’ve got to….” Then the young woman nodded toward Hulan. When the man turned and saw her too, the rest of his sentence evaporated. He waved, said something more to the young woman that Hulan didn’t catch, then the two of them walked over to the boulders to meet Ma’s visitors.
    Ma interrupted his recitation of the Four Mysteries and introduced David and Hulan to Stuart Miller and his daughter, Catherine. Hulan didn’t need to hear Ma’s flowery praise to know Stuart’s accomplishments. He owned Miller Enterprises, a conglomerate with multiple subsidiaries, including Miller Engineering. The state-run Chinese press called Miller “a good friend to China,” who had shown his friendship in many ways. Most recently he’d signed a billion-dollar contract to provide crews, expertise, and machinery for the building of turbines for the Three Gorges Dam. He was a distinguished-looking man, in his early fifties. His daughter had gotten her good looks from her father. Catherine’s hair hung in long, lustrous brown curls. Heavy mascara and eyeliner outlined mesmerizing deep brown eyes. Voluptuous young breasts pushed against the