Walking the Wall.(Great Wall of China)

When the weather is good, or when I'm tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains. The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and terminates at the Great Wall of China.

Once, I packed a tent, hiked up from the village, and walked eastward atop the wall for two days without seeing another person. Tourists rarely visit this area, where the wall is perched high along a ridgeline, magnificent in its isolation. The structure is made of stone, brick, and mortar; there are crenellations and archer slits, and guard towers that rise more than twenty feet high. The tallest one is known locally as the Great Eastern Tower, and just before it an inscribed marble tablet sits on the wall. Originally, there were many such tablets, but this is one of fewer than ten that are known to remain on the wall in the Beijing region. The inscription notes that in 1615 A.D. a crew of two thousand four hundred soldiers built a section of the wall which was fifty-eight zhang and five cun long. That's about six hundred and fifty feet, and the bureaucratic precision of the inscription, in this forgotten place, seems as lonely as words can be.

In November of 2005, I hiked to the Great Eastern Tower with two friends who were visiting from New York. After reaching the tower, we began the long descent to the south. This stretch can be treacherous: many of the brick ramparts have collapsed. I was picking my way downhill when something in the rubble caught my eye. It was white--too white to be brick, too big to be mortar. I dug it out and saw four neat rows of carved characters.

It was a fragment of another marble tablet. I could make out some of the words: something was six chi high, and something else was two zhang. But the writing was in classical Chinese, which I've never studied, and the surface was badly scarred.

"How long do you think it's been buried here?" one of my friends asked.

"I have no idea," I said. But I knew one person who might be able to tell me. My friends and I covered the artifact with loose bricks, and I memorized the location. A month later, I returned with David Spindler.

David Spindler stands six feet seven, and he is reserved in a way that is characteristic of many men who are very tall and thin. For years, I'd seen him occasionally at social gatherings in Beijing, where he always seemed to make sure that he was sitting down. He is thirty-nine years old, with short sandy hair, a long face, and gentle eyes. He chooses his words very carefully. Since 2002, he has worked full time as an independent scholar of the Great Wall, and although he has no academic affiliation or outside funding, he has become one of its leading researchers.