The rhythm was slow and deep, much like the sound of camel bells at night in the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang. Zhong Hua suddenly stood up: "This is the rhythm of the camel caravans we heard at Mingsha Mountain!"
The pendulum of the clock seemed to have become a time machine, with different swing frequencies corresponding to the sound rhythms of different places they had traveled to. Ayu stared at the wave patterns on the pendulum and suddenly realized that these patterns were not only a map of typhoon wave heights, but also a physical record of special sound waves from various places.
“And the boat ticket and the message in a bottle.” She picked up the two items. “Why is the ink bleeding the same on them?”
Zhong Hua took the boat ticket and looked at it against the light: "On July 15, 1983, my grandfather's boat was taking shelter from the wind near Weizhou Island, and it is very likely that he encountered the person who threw the message in a bottle." He pointed to the circle at the mouth of the Pearl River on the boat ticket, "This mark is not a reef, but a specific location, perhaps a signal point agreed upon by him and someone else."
Old Zhou was assembling the clock core when he suddenly exclaimed, "Oh! Look at this!" He picked up a thin copper wire with tweezers, the end of which was wrapped with half a piece of faded blue cloth. "This thing is stuck in the gear, like it fell off some clothes."
Ayu took the copper wire, and the pattern of the blue cloth gave her a jolt—it was exactly the same as the pattern of the blue printed cloth handkerchief her mother had left her, and her mother had said that the handkerchief was made of old homespun cloth from the 1980s.
Chapter Three: The Curve of the Pendulum
The watch repairman spent the entire afternoon adjusting the clock. As the setting sun streamed through the attic window, Old Zhou finally tightened the last screw: "Give it a try."
Zhong Hua took a deep breath and gently wound up the clock. For the first few seconds, the clock did not respond. Just when the three thought they had failed, the pendulum suddenly began to swing—not with the regular "click" sound, but with a deep hum, much like the call of swans circling over Qinghai Lake.
"Look at the pendulum!" Ayu exclaimed.
The arc drawn by the brass pendulum is remarkably graceful, and the angle formed by the highest and lowest points of each swing is exactly the angle at which a swan's wings spread – approximately 120 degrees. As the pendulum swings, faint ripples begin to appear on the clock face, like ripples on a lake stirred by the wind.
“This is an optical projection,” Old Zhou said, pointing to the prism hidden inside the clock case. “My grandfather installed a miniature prism inside the clock case, which refracts light when the pendulum swings.”
Even more amazingly, when the pendulum swings to a specific arc, the light refracted by the prism projects patterns onto the ceiling. The first swing creates the outline of Bird Island in Qinghai Lake; the second swing transforms the light into the water flow path of the Sacred Waterfall in Yubeng Village; and the third swing creates the shape of sand dunes in Crescent Lake in Dunhuang.
“He was recording his travel route.” Zhong Hua’s voice trembled slightly. “He used the swinging arc of a pendulum and optical projection to record the places he had been.”
Ayu's gaze fell on the 1983 ship ticket, and she suddenly made a new discovery: "The route map on the ship ticket is actually the migration route of swans!" She pointed to the winding wavy line on the map, "From Shanghai to Guangzhou, and then turning towards the South China Sea, this is almost the same as the route that swans take every winter from Siberia to the South China Sea."
Zhong Hua picked up his grandfather's logbook and turned to the page from July 1983. On the back of the originally blank title page, a swan with outstretched wings was lightly drawn in pencil, its wings spread at an angle of 120 degrees, and the swan's beak was pointing to the coordinates of Weizhou Island.
“He met the person who threw the message in a bottle on Weizhou Island,” Ayu said softly. “Maybe it was a child who used the bottle to send some kind of message, and my grandfather used this clock to record the moment of their encounter.”
Old Zhou had already packed up his toolbox: "The movement of this clock has been modified. The weight of the pendulum and the meshing of the gears are all designed to accurately record a certain natural frequency." He looked at the pendulum, "Now it can keep time normally, but this special function... you can figure it out yourselves."
After Lao Zhou left, only the hum of the pendulum remained in the attic. Ayu walked to the clock, watching the graceful arc drawn by the pendulum, and suddenly remembered that when she looked at the starry sky at Namtso Lake, the movement of the Big Dipper seemed to follow some kind of pattern.
"Could the frequency of the pendulum's swing be related to star trails?" she suddenly said.
Zhong Hua immediately opened the star map app on his phone and searched for the night sky over Weizhou Island on July 15, 1983. When he simulated the star trails to 3:15, he was surprised to find that the angle pointed to by the handle of the Big Dipper coincided exactly with the arc of the pendulum's swing.
“My grandfather not only recorded the geographical sounds, but also the astronomical angles.” Zhong Hua’s finger traced the star trails on the phone screen. “3:15, that’s probably the time he saw the specific celestial phenomena on Weizhou Island.”
Ayu picked up the blue cloth she found in the gear and suddenly remembered her mother's blue-printed cotton handkerchief. She ran downstairs and rummaged through the bottom of a trunk to find the old wooden box. Sure enough, there was a photo of her mother when she was young—in 1983, her mother was standing on the rocks of Weizhou Island, holding the blue-printed cotton handkerchief in her hand, and in the background, the outline of a cargo ship could be vaguely seen.
“My mother…” Ayu’s voice choked up, “She was on Weizhou Island back then.”
Zhong Hua took the photo. On the back of the photo, a line of small characters was written in pen: "Waiting for the wind to come, waiting for you to return." The handwriting was delicate and beautiful, just like the "Waiting for the wind to come" on the message in the bottle, only more mature.
Chapter Four: The End of the Route
The rains of the plum rain season have stopped. Zhong Hua and A Yu, carrying the clock and the pile of old things, boarded the ship to Weizhou Island. At sunrise at sea, the pendulum suddenly hummed differently than usual, the arc drawn by the pendulum became 90 degrees, and the light spots projected by the prism onto the cabin wall were the shape of the Weizhou Island volcano crater.
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