Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [155]
Frank got out at a settlement of tents, yurts, mobile homes, and cinder block structures, all next to an ancient dusty tumbledown of brown brick walls. He was greeted there by a Chinese-American archeologist named Eric Chung, with whom he had exchanged e-mails.
Chung took him by jeep around the old site. The actual dig occupied only a little corner of it. The ruins covered about a thousand acres, Chung told him, and so far they had excavated ten.
Everything in sight, from horizon to horizon, was a shade of brown: the Kunlun Mountains rising to the south, the plains, the bricks of the ruin, and in a slightly lighter shade, the newly exposed bricks of the dig.
“So this was Shambhala?” Frank said.
“That’s right.”
“In what sense, exactly?”
“That was what the Tibetans called it while it existed. That arroyo and wash you see down the slope was a tributary of the Tarim River, and it ran all year round, because the climate was wetter and the snow pack on the Kunluns was thicker, and there were glaciers. They’re saying that flooding the Tarim Basin may bring glaciers back again, by the way, so that this river would run again, which is one of the reasons we have to get the dig at the lower points done fast. Anyway, it was a very advanced city, the center of the kingdom of Khocho. Powerful and prominent in that time. It was located on a precursor of the Silk Road, and existed on trade and so on. A very rich culture. So the Bön people in Tibet considered it to be the land of milk and honey, and when the Buddhist monasteries took over up there, they developed a legend that this was a magical city, and Guru Rimpoche started the Shambhala motif in their iconography. It reminds me of the Atlantis myth, in that Plato wrote a thousand years after the explosion at Thera, but still described certain aspects of the Minoan colony on the island pretty well, especially the circular shape of the island. In this case the time lag is about the same, and Shambhala was always described in the literature as being square, with the corners at the four cardinal points, and surrounded by water. What we’re finding here are irrigation ditches that leave the riverbed upstream from the site, and circle it and rejoin the river downstream. And the city is platted in a square that is oriented north-south-east-west. So it fits the pattern, it has the name, it’s the right period. So, that’s the sense in which we call it Shambhala.”
“Wow. So it’s like finding Troy, or Thera.”
“Yes, exactly. A very exciting find. And the Chinese so far are being pretty good about it. The dike holding in this part of the new sea has been rerouted to keep the site out of the water. And between the site and the new lake it looks like they are hoping to create a new tourist destination, linked to the Tibet tour. We’re already seeing some Shangri-La hotels and travel companies springing up out here.”
“Amazing,” Frank said. “I wonder if it will catch on.”
“Who knows? But at least we won’t have to hurry to excavate a site that’s going to be drowned. I did that in Turkey, and it’s a terrible experience.”
Frank walked around the site with the man. “How old is it, did you say?”
“Eighth century.”
“And was it founded by a Rudra Cakrin?”
“Yes, that’s right. Very good.”
“But I read that he founded the city in sixteen thousand BC?”
“Yes,” Chung said, laughing, “they do say that, but it’s the same with Plato saying Atlantis was ten thousand years old and a hundred miles across. These stories appear to get exaggerated by a factor of ten.”
“Interesting.” They walked