When Yan Zhiqiu reached the fourth and final movement of the Harvest Song, she lowered her hands from the Broken Slate and turned her face directly toward the tiered arena.
She didn’t gesture with royal arrogance. She simply opened her arms wide, her dark silk sleeves falling back to reveal her pale, salt-scarred forearms. Her eyes swept across the eighty tiers of stone seating, meeting the eyes of three million men, women, and children who stood waiting in unbroken silence.
She sang the call of the final chorus:
The sea is deep, the night is long, The stone is awakened by our song; Arise, O children of the plain, And bring the morning back again!
At that command, three million mortal voices opened together.
It wasn’t a ragged, clashing shout. For six hours, throughout the long midnight vigil and the ten-part polyphony of the giant statues, their breathing rhythms, their heartbeats, and their hearing senses had been conditioned by the standing waves of the hall.
Without a single rehearsal, three million human throats struck the deepest chord in perfect all at once.
The volume of sound that erupted into the cave was staggering, registering one hundred and twenty-eight point six decibels at the center of the plaza.
