A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [41]
Below Stratton, in roofless chambers that extended in four files, lay the Emperor Qin’s celestial army. Stratton stood on a concrete platform, which was shaped like a square U with two wings stretched out parallel along the files. In the pit, a modern army of Chinese technicians worked with brushes, dust pans and hand shovels. Stratton stared into the chamber where three hundred clay soldiers stood.
They were magnificent. He had seen pictures, of course—who had not?—but even that foretaste had left Stratton unprepared for their true majesty.
The figures were life-sized, nearly six feet tall. They had been molded from gray river clay by master craftsmen, dead for twenty-two hundred years. Stratton stared with breathless fascination at the nearest warrior, a kneeling archer. The detail was extraordinary.
The archer wore a topknot, pulled tightly to the left side of his head and held with a band. Stratton could count the hairs.
The archer’s ears clung close to his skull. The eyebrows were high and stylized, as though they had been plucked. The nose was broad, classically Chinese. The warrior had affected a finely combed mustache and a tuft of hair on his chin. On the face, mirthless and resolute, were flecks of blue and red paint mixed two centuries before Christ was born.
The archer wore a studded jerkin that reached below his waist and ended high on the biceps. It afforded protection from sword slashes, while at the same time allowing mobility with which to wield a bow. Below the waist, the emperor’s soldier wore a skirtlike loincloth, leggings and stout, square-toed sandals.
Nearby, a second archer wore the same uniform, but his face was different—rounder, a trifle older, no mustache. Every soldier, Stratton noted with awe, had a different face—in eternity, as in life.
Stratton paced the arms of the platform. Here lay a terracotta arm jutting out from the red clay. And there, a headless torso, being dusted by a young woman with intense concentration. Toward the back of the vast hall, new chambers had been carefully outlined in chalk, but had so far been unmolested. Working at their current painstaking pace, Stratton reckoned, it would take the Chinese technicians at least another ten or twenty years to exploit the dig completely. Stratton was fascinated. He could have stayed for hours. Too soon, Mr. Xia was at his side.
“Director Ku will see you for a few moments, but you must hurry. It is nearly closing time.”
Reluctantly, Stratton followed him out of the chamber.
“Mr. Xia, do you realize that this might be the most important archaeological discovery of this century?” Stratton asked.
“Yes, so many American friends have told us. The soldiers excite them very much, but there are many other discoveries as well.”
“Can I see them?”
“I am sorry, but only the soldiers are open to the public.”
Director Ku was a roly-poly individual with a ready smile and the callused hands of a worker. Stratton squatted on the inevitable overstuffed chair and tried not to drink the tea.
The pleasantries went quickly enough. Ku, Stratton suspected, was not a man to keep his dinner waiting. Even the set speech that seemed to come with every Chinese official’s job seemed to sail by: the discovery had been made in 1965 by peasants digging a well. During the Cultural Revolution, not much happened. Since then, the work had proceeded systematically, entirely in the hands of Chinese specialists; no foreigners were welcome. Test excavations were still being dug. So far, scientists had positively identified an armory, an imperial zoo, stables, other groups of warriors, the tombs of nobles sacrificed to mark the emperor’s death, the underground entrance to the tumulus and exquisite bronze workings, including a chariot two-thirds life-size.
“I did not know about the bronzes,” said Stratton. “Can they be seen?”
“They are