Conspiracy of a Shrine

(The following story is a fiction based on what occurred in Country J.)

We arrived there at 6 a.m. The sky was still dark and the air was cold. It was the first time for us, me and my junior staff, to come to this country. A week earlier, the bureau chief had told us to investigate the cause of an unexplainable phenomenon happening in the premises of a shrine. A red dot had been on satellite image pictures since the bureau had started to take such pictures of the country over thirty years ago. But recently, the dot had been growing and it was no longer a dot, but a shorter version of the Great Wall of China. I knew that the bureau would decide whether to launch a new bureau-wide investigation or send the case to a storage room based on the results of our field trip. Once case files were sent to the room, they would have never been seen for more than a hundred years.

We started to climb a mountain behind the shrine at 7 a.m. The satellite images suggested that something red was located at the back of the shrine and extended toward north. The mountain path was not steep, but was lined with thousands of vermilion arches. Each arch was about three meters high and one meter wide and some were much larger, more than five meters high and one and a half meters wide. They were built along the path one meter apart and from where I stood, there seemed thousands of such arches through the top of the mountain. 

We nodded to each other. The satellite images must have been those of these arches. We were relieved and even slightly disappointed at this too easy answer and about to return when remembering that the strange thing was not only its presence, but its mysterious growth in recent years. “How many arches are supposed to be?” A Caucasian guy passing by me uttered this question, which also was popping up in my mind. It was no surprise that every visitor wondered how many arches there were and how many of them they had gone through. We were accustomed to see unusual local cultures, but even we could not help but ask ourselves seriously these questions. We should have brought a people counter to measure the number of these arches….

A few hours later, we saw a long line of people in front of a wooden building, halfway up the mountain. It was gigantic for a wooden building and seemed some kind of a shop. The shop was still closed, but it had a sign on the entrance reading “Open at 10 a.m.” I wondered what they wanted to buy so badly even if they had to wait in a long queue. I approached the store and snooped around it and found, although inside was dark and unclear, vermilion arches in various sizes being piled up. An Asian man, one of those waiting in the line, discussed with his wife the size of an arch they would buy, according to our translation machine. The wife was staring at her mobile phone to compare prices for each size. “This is too small, isn’t it?” “Yeah, why don’t you buy a larger one? The price isn't so different.” This led to a black woman telling her husband that she wanted two medium-sized arches, one each for their daughter and son. And then, a child asked her parents to get five arches for her birthday present. She would be five years old on the following day. We wondered how many arches were sold a day. Voices were heard from the left side of the building. A group of men wearing Buddhist robes got out from a backdoor with cement bags on their shoulders and some kind of machines. They were all young, maybe in their 20s, talking in a local language. These men were going toward the top of the mountain. Something made us follow them. It was easy to do so without causing suspicion as we all were heading toward the top.

We had walked for more than thirty minutes until they stopped and put the machine and bags on the ground. It was around the top of the mountain or might be a few hundred meters down from the top on the opposite side. We saw dozens of large vermilion arches laid in groups. The size of the arches varied between groups, ranging from a group of smaller ones, i.e., two-meter long and less than one meter wide, to a group of larger ones, i.e., seven meter long and two meter wide. But they all had one thing in common, the vermilion color. One of the men took out a piece of paper from his pocket and read it, "largest one." In response, four men approached the pile of the largest arches, took one, carried it one meter away from the last arch, further into the woods where two other men were drilling two holes using a land drilling machine. Then, the four men stuck the two legs of the arch into the two holes, pour cement into the holes, staked the arch, and went back to where the remaining arches were laid. They repeated these processes again and again.

In the following thirty minutes, six arches were erected. It was so efficient and quiet that the only thing we could hear was the sound of drilling. The men were sweating, but uttered no word. I had concluded by that time that they were employees of a construction company which had been hired by the shrine for this construction work and did not know anything about what they were doing. But the place of the work was just a few hundred meters away from the country border and if they kept working like this, the shrine would invade soon Country K, one of the most notoriously dangerous countries around the world. But why on earth did they have to care about it? They were hired to perform their duties for fee. Rather, I questioned myself how such a thing could be going on without being known by the local government.

We left the shrine immediately and filed a report to the bureau on that day. I knew that the case would be sent to the "solved" section of the storage room and would not be seen for the following hundred years. But again, this had nothing to do with our country and I was almost certain that Country J had known or might have intended this for a long time.