Star trails and mountain paths on nautical charts
I. The Fading 1982: On the seventh day of the rainy season, Ayu squatted in front of a pile of rubble at a demolition site, her utility knife prying along the edge of an old bulletin board's metal sheet. Rust crumbled from the blade, mingling with the damp scent of moss, like an aroma pickled by time. Zhong Hua stood behind her, holding an umbrella. Raindrops leaking from the red umbrella condensed into beads in her hair, vaguely reminding him of three years ago in Yubeng Village, when the glint of diamonds refracted by the icy lake clung to her eyelashes in the same way.
“Look at this.” Ayu’s voice was half-swallowed by the sound of raindrops hitting the tin. She successfully peeled off a piece of poster, and on the palm-sized piece of paper was a faded advertisement for “Shanghai Brand Watches”. The model’s smiling face was blurred by the rain, but the curve of his mouth inexplicably resembled the outline of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake.
As Zhong Hua leaned closer, he smelled the camphor scent emanating from the edge of the fragment. It was the scent of his grandmother's camphor wood chest. When he was a child, he would always rummage through the bottom of the chest to find his grandfather's nautical logbook, with dried seaweed sandwiched between the pages, as crisp as biscuits. And now, as Ayu's fingertips turned the fragment, he saw the blue ink seeping out on the back—not the ink from advertising printing, but lines drawn by hand with a fountain pen.
“1982…” Ayu pointed to the blurred numbers in the corner of the page, where half a faded anchor image still clung. The timetable's lines had blurred into bluish-gray watermarks, but the arrow for the route from Shanghai to Qingdao was unusually clear, like a scar polished by time. Even stranger, the wave patterns weren't the usual curves, but rather fine, branching lines. Ayu took out her phone to illuminate the waves and suddenly exclaimed, “These patterns…”
She zoomed in on a photo of Weizhou Island stored on her phone—a cross-section of coral she had taken last year while diving in a crater. The radial structure formed by the calcareous skeleton was exactly the same as the wave patterns on the nautical chart. It was as if someone had used a pen to replicate the corals deep in the South China Sea onto a nautical chart in the north more than thirty years ago.
II. Lighthouses and Pulsars
When the rain stopped, Zhong Hua held the fragment up to the sunlight. The dust netting at the demolition site rustled in the wind, filtering sunlight onto the nautical chart and making the blue ink lines suddenly come alive. Ayu followed his gesture and noticed the three lighthouse symbols marked along the route—not the usual conical shapes, but three star-shaped marks made with a pen.
“The pulsar at Namtso Lake.” Zhong Hua’s fingertip traced the first mark. “The PSR B1509-58 we recorded with a telescope last year points right here.” His fingernail left faint white marks on the paper, corresponding to the pulsar’s coordinates on the star chart. The second mark corresponds to PSR J0835-4510, and the third is the source of the fast radio burst they accidentally captured that night at Shengxiang Tianmen.
Ayu's heart skipped a beat. She remembered that cold night at Namtso Lake, Zhong Hua, bundled up in a down jacket, explaining the rotation period of pulsars to her, the cracking sound of the lake freezing and the clatter of the telescope's adjustment knobs blending together. And now, these three lighthouse symbols before her, with the same angle and spacing, perfectly replicated the secret of that night's starry sky.
“And this.” Zhong Hua laid the fragment flat on the cement platform left by the demolition. Sunlight filtered through the ink dots on the paper, casting dappled patterns of light on the surface. He took out his phone, opened the altitude measurement app, and slowly dragged it along the trajectory of the light spots—from the starting point of Nilong Village in Yubeng Village, to the Sacred Waterfall, the Ice Lake, and then to Xiaonong Base Camp at an altitude of 5360 meters. The arc of the light spots as they climbed and fell perfectly matched the contour map they had recorded during their trek. Most amazingly, when the light spots reached the position corresponding to the “Sacred Waterfall,” the ink dots suddenly coalesced into a single drop, just like the glacial meltwater that had dripped from Ayu’s hair.
“1982,” Ayu murmured, her fingertips brushing over the almost invisible creases on the pages. “We weren’t even born then.” She remembered her mother’s dowry chest, which contained a nautical calendar from the 1980s. The title page was inscribed with “Shanghai Port Authority” in blue ink, but the handwriting was more vigorous than on the nautical chart, like a rope polished by the sea breeze.
III. The Echo in the Camphor Wood Box
That evening, when she got home, Ayu pulled her mother's camphor wood chest from under the bed. Sure enough, under the third layer of moisture-proof paper, lay the nautical calendar. The moment she opened the first page, Zhong Hua gasped—the pen doodle in the lower right corner was an unfinished anchor, exactly the same as the design on the fragment. And when Ayu placed the fragment on a page of the calendar, sunlight filtered through the overlapping pages, creating a wondrous superimposed image of the 1982 nautical timetable and her mother's handwriting.
“Look here.” Zhong Hua pointed to the location of “Qingdao Port” on the timetable. The ink dot there was darker than elsewhere, and the spot of light cast by it in the sunlight corresponded precisely to the location of the glacial lake in Yubeng Village. Meanwhile, the ink dot and spot of light for Shanghai Port fell on the Sacred Elephant Gate of Namtso Lake. He suddenly remembered that his grandfather’s logbook mentioned that in 1982, a cargo ship encountered a storm in the Bohai Bay, and the crew mistook a pulsar for a lighthouse when using celestial navigation.
Ayu's fingers suddenly touched a hidden compartment at the bottom of the camphor wood box. The moment she pushed open the copper clasp, a salty, fishy smell wafted out—several seashells were stacked in the compartment, one of which, a triton shell, had a spiral pattern that perfectly matched the direction of the waves on the fragment. On the inside of the shell, tiny numbers were written in pencil: 30.5°N, 90.1°E—the coordinates of Namtso Lake.
“My mother has never been to Namtso.” Ayu’s voice trembled slightly. She remembered her mother saying before she died that her maternal grandfather had been an ocean liner and had disappeared during a voyage in 1982. The camphor wood chest was her grandfather’s keepsake, and her mother always said that this nautical calendar smelled of her father.
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