Legacy

My wife Karen and I were taking a South China Sea tour of beautiful areas.  Some of nature’s finest fairy-land like fantasies in real life.  I’m Jason Arness, and this vacation was fulfilling a dream of seeing these islets in person, or should I say thousands of huge projections of rocks with caves and covered with lush vegetation. Integrated with the South China Coastlines are some smaller, some larger, but on the  average  about  three hundred feet across at the base, tapering upward to a height of about five hundred feet.

 

They were like jewels set in calm blue green sea.  Hundreds of different birds flew to and fro with their different cries and songs like unto a symphony.  Many a junk (Chinese boat) were about fishing and hauling tourists like ourselves.

 

As our guide told us very few had any inhabitants as a flat spot even half way up was rare.  Yet some used that as a base of operation for the gathering of swallow nests hanging sometimes a hundred feet high from the roof of a cave.  These nests were highly prized and brought good money for the gatherers when they were sold in the Chinese mainland.  Its what Birds Nest Soup is made of, and prized for the protein.  Personally I’d never eat authentic Birds Nest Soup, because that protein is from bird droppings. Ugghhh! And Yuk!

 

The gatherers construct climbing aids by lashing together bamboo to form long flimsy swaying poles which they scramble up like human monkeys to get at the nests.  Very dangerous, but it’s their way.

 

Well, it was getting towards sunset and our guide said we would put in at the Islet called Pao Hu Sun Puola.  It was one of about a dozen out of thousands that had any kind of beach at all.

 

This one apparently had the largest beach of any; about two hundred and twenty five feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet deep.  We were told we would enjoy a typical South China Feast as prepared over an open fire.  Sounded good to me as long as part of it wasn’t Birds Nest Soup.  We were also told by our guide that he’d play a typical Chinese Melody on the Musical Stones of Pao Hu Sun Puola.  I thought that ought to be something else.  It was.

 

It seems as the fireside legend went that the stones which were placed like on a marimba or xylophone over two very ancient logs, which sat upon a stone dais, were discovered for the purpose about one hundred years ago.  They were thought to be hundreds of years, maybe thousands old.  The uniqueness lied in the fact that while they were made of stone, when struck produced a beautiful tone, Each stone had a different tone. Our guide played a couple of ditties, not that well.  But tones like those coming from stones was very impressive.

 

The feast was very good, surprisingly so, and fortunately no Birds Nest Soup.  We all slept the night by firelight and awoke to a beautiful sunrise.  In the morning Karen and I decided to take a closer look at the musical stones while our guide was rusting up some sort of Chinese type breakfast.  All adding quite well to the trips ambiance.

 

I was getting ready to take a whack at playing on the thing when my wife Karen said, wait a minute, look at this.  She pointed out some kind of writing on the face of the dais.  Two lines, the top line longer, the bottom line shorter.  The writing was obviously not Chinese, but some sort of hieroglyphics.  Not Egyptian or Mayan like, but different. Both Karen and I have an observant nature.  She noticed that the number of characters in the top line were equal to the number of musical stones.  I noticed and added that the same symbols were used on the bottom line, just fewer of them and in different order.

 

About that time a light bulb lit up in both our brains and we turned and looked at each other with total astonishment.  It was obvious the top line represented the musical scale and the bottom line represented suggested notes to be struck in that order. Okay I said I’m game I’ll do it.

 

I did and the results were must unexpected; the ground began to shake and I surely thought earthquake, we are doomed.  Fortunately that analysis was wrong.   Apparently the note sequence acted like a sonic/vibratory switch and the area of the campfire and our breakfast began to shudder.  The next thing that happened with a smooth suddenness was the sand and campfire flew ever which way  as a stone pillar about three feet wide and four feet long, pushed its way up to a point about three feet above the beach.

 

Perched atop of it was a stone casket like box with a stone lid that had more strange symbols on it.  We opened it up and inside there were gold plates, maybe brass, not sure. Yellowish in any case.  More strange hieroglyphics very minutely written.

 

Wow! We were flabbergasted and entranced.  What a find.  About that time our guide had gotten his wits back and rushed over to get an eyeful.  He too became excited.  He sure let the air out of our balloon though when he said, you know these have to be turned over to the Chinese government. Not happy news, but obviously true.  He’d probably get a Peoples Hero Medal while we got squat.  That’s life.

 

However my wife was always the smart one and decided to salvage something from it all.  While on the way back to the China Mainland Port, she made pencil ridge tracings of every one of them.

 

Very clever, as the words whatever they were was the important part anyway.  On the way to the Port I said to Karen, I remember reading about cylindrical stone records with very small writings on them discovered in the Caves of the Bayan Kara-Ula Mountains on the Tibetan border way, way north of here. I wonder if the symbols are the same. She said who knows the Chinese Government probably cabbaged on to those also.

 

Well we got back to our home in the good old U.S.A.

I said to Karen what should we do with those tracings.  She said there were several possibilities.  The first one she was going to check out involved a trip to Salt Lake City.  She didn’t have to spell that out; as it was obvious she wanted the writing on the Mormon Plates to be compared for symbol style.  Then she produced a single plate.  I said you didn’t, she said compulsion forced her. I said if we’d been caught we’d be doing life in a Chinese prison. Still I had to she said, for metallurgical analysis and comparison with the Morman Plates.  I said it will probably get very interesting, and only time would tell rather or not we’d just opened a can of worms, or Pandoras box.