“Rows of squared stones so covered with lichen they seemd older than time itself. Gave me the shivers just walking by them. All gone now, no trace left, and not a prayer spoken.”

“Messages started coming from the sky,” a man down the table volunteered.

“The sky?” Shan asked.

The man nodded. “Prayers drift down out of the clouds.”

“Shouldn’t have blasted that god’s hole,” muttered the burly worker across from Shan.

“God’s hole?” Shan asked.

“An old cave with strange markings all over its walls and an old painting of some blue demon in the entrance, like he lived there.” The man lowered his voice and grew solemn. “As if he were the last of the old gods, watching over those graves of his friends. Some of those close by the blast said they heard the god screaming inside as the cave collapsed.”

Half an hour later Shan parked behind a boulder just below the highest point on the access road, then pulled out his binoculars and began walking. He found a flat ledge overlooking the valley, then sat in the wind-shielded place between two boulders and began scanning the slopes, looking for where the god cave had been. He paused to focus on unusual piles of rocks and loose earth then finally discovered a line of tall lhatse, rock cairns, a third of the way down the tall ridge near the mouth of the valley where the dam was being constructed. Tibetans built such cairns as markers but often also to hold mani, stones inscribed with prayers along pilgrim routes or paths to temples. He could see eight cairns, four at an equal distance from each other, then a large gap in the line followed by four more that were evenly spaced.

When Shan was young, Shan’s father and uncle had taught him the verses of the Tao te Ching, and he still sometimes threw the old yarrow sticks that were used in Taoist meditation rituals to randomly select a verse for contemplation. He knelt for a moment, bypassing the ritual, and with a stick drew a tetragram in the dirt near his feet, a solid line over a broken line of two segments, a solid line and another broken line of two parts. It signified Chapter Eleven, one of his favorites. Using the emptiness, his uncle called it. Clay is shaped to form a vessel, one verse said. What is not there gives it meaning. He had long ago discovered its use as an investigation technique. The cairns were guideposts on either side of a destination. The shadowed gap was what gave them meaning. It was the mouth of the god’s hole. Was that where the American woman and the Chinese professor had died? Workers had heard screaming from inside.