Three of the remaining photos were of marks on stone walls that might have been primitive renderings in yellow ochre of animals or supernatural beings. The last was another ochre image on a wall but this one was clearly identifiable. It was a Christian cross.

“A Tibetan herder took the professor and me to the valley two years ago,” Cao explained. “The local people have many names for it. Valley of the Gods, Holy Home, Gekho’s Roost, for the earth god who was said to reside there.” He pointed to the photo of the rectangle of standing stones. “There have been over a dozen of these fields identified in Tibet, mostly in the western regions. They were erected more than three thousand years ago and seemed to have had a religious purpose. As far as we could tell it was the best preserved of all the stone fields, sort of Tibet’s Stonehenge. The same grids of pillars are seen in Siberia and in the Scythian culture in central Asia. It would take years of study to understand it. We were going to take some days off from the Green Army dig to take more photos and begin to formulate plans for closer analysis.

“But the first thing they did, as a dramatic gesture for what they called their project launch day, was to bulldoze the field. By the end of the day it was leveled and scraped so no trace was left.”

“The stone wall images are from the cavern?” Shan asked.

Cao nodded. “The local people said that on the spring equinox the shadow of the central row of pillars at sunrise pointed to the mouth of the cavern. The earliest images on the walls were carved petroglyphs made with iron tools. The others are of ochre paint, some probably dating back two thousand years and more.”

“And this one, much more recent,” Shan said, pointing to the cross.

“There was a Jesuit explorer, Father Ippolito Desideri, who visited Tibet in the early eighteenth century. He was intensely curious about Tibet and its origins, wrote that it was the best evidence of the complexity of the human soul he had ever found. He spoke of being taken on a tour of religious sites by some lamas, some of the sites secret and ancient. We think it is likely that the valley was one of the sites he visited. When the professor first visited the valley, he said it was one of the most important archaeological sites in Tibet, perhaps in all of central Asia. I could have spent the rest of my career studying it. Now it is all gone.”

“Natalie was in the cave,” Pike stated.

Cao glanced up at the American then quickly away. “Yes. She was going to help make the case to the United Nations cultural office to preserve it, to focus international attention on it. She was going to take our report back to America.”

“Who knew that?” Shan asked.