Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron Read Free Book Online Page A

roundel–the detritus of some building, it seemed; a little incense-burner upheld by stumpy beasts; pieces of green pottery.
    Huang’s chatter drained away against the man’s silence, and we peered at these objects unspeaking across two thousand years. I found no clue for doubting them. This region was riddled with ancient cemeteries, impossible to police. The smuggler dusted the dragon with remote tenderness. Unbelieving, like him, in their efficacy for the dead, I gazed on these only as dissociated objects. Yet once snatched from the context of their tombs, I knew, their scientific value was lost.
    After a while the man began rummaging in his cupboards again, and gentled a statuette out of a cardboard box. This, I sensed, was his real treasure. More than anything that he said, the fluttering care with which he unfolded it, and the tightening in his face, betrayed its value. ‘Tang dynasty,’ he said.
    It was the foot-high figurine of a temple guardian. Its head twisted upward in a leonine roar, its cap’s earflaps were flying out and one fist was raised in fury. It was still coated in earth. He wanted six thousand dollars for it.
    It was, of course, hideous. It was meant to be. I shook my head.
    He said: ‘This comes from an imperial tomb.’
    I asked in disbelief: ‘Which emperor?’
    He answered at once: ‘Taizong.’ So he imagined it early seventh century, and I had no idea if this could be so. He said: ‘This will sell for three hundred thousand dollars in New York.’
    I said: ‘I can’t take it out.’
    ‘I understand.’ He pursed his lips. ‘These are the most risky to take out. But if you have a friend in the embassy, or businesscontacts in Hong Kong…they can ship it to you anywhere. No questions.’
    ‘No questions,’ echoed Huang.
    I looked back at the statuette indifferently. Huang’s eyes had dilated. ‘You could make big money back home.’
    Then, almost casually, as if in afterthought, the smuggler lifted something heavy from a nest of paper and set it on the counter. ‘Tang dynasty. Only four thousand dollars.’
    I stared at it in shock. In the sordid secrecy of his shop, locked in that yellow light and silence, it was beautiful. A head of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, almost life size. Under the commotion of her coiffured hair and flower-studded headdress, the face was stilled into an abstract peace. The deep double curve of the brows above the near-closed eyes imposed a geometric severity. In this stone diagram the delicate nose and mouth made no disturbance. Carved from the white local granite, she might have been sleeping.
    The man sensed my quickened interest. ‘I can put you in touch with someone in Hong Kong…’
    I gazed at the face in a turmoil of indecision. It was in Tang dynasty China that the mustachioed Indian Bodhisattva, who ushered souls to paradise, underwent a sex change and became the goddess Guanyin. Perhaps those serenely androgynous features recorded the moment of transition. If genuine, the head was all but priceless. But I had no way to know, no way to save it. I glanced back at the smuggler. I wanted to despise him. But he looked clouded, abstract. Beneath his drift of boyish hair shone a scholar’s forehead, polished like eggshell. I wondered vaguely: if I denounced him, would he be executed? A life for a statue.
    Perhaps it was to save myself, or him, that I began to decide the head was fake. It was surely too smooth, too perfect? Where was its body? And why did he value it less than the tomb guardian? If it was a forgery, I concluded in bewilderment, it was pure kitsch. I stared at it again, in frustration. The face was a radiant blank: a receptacle for people’s dreams. Gently I put it back in its paper nest, and covered it over.
    For a while the smuggler talked of other, exculpating things: therash of urban unemployment, the hardships of peasant life. Then his interest faded. He sensed me slipping away. A few minutes later the iron gate rattled down