Standing stones

Standing stones is a recurring image that turns the towers of Pudong from monuments to wealth into a vision of a cemetery. First associated with a journey to a remote Scottish island, the image returns at the construction site in Shanghai and changes meaning as the American falls into the mud among the dead.

From ancient stones to a modern skyline

The American recalls a trip to a distant Scottish island, where stone fingers rise in strange circles, built for worship of an unknown god. Against that memory, the steel-and-glass towers emerging through the mist around him seem incongruous yet strangely familiar. The comparison sharpens when the Jin Mao Tower appears beyond the construction site: Pudong’s towers have risen from marshland transformed by its special economic status, and the American reads them as standing stones raised to Money. His satisfaction at recognizing that shared object of worship binds him to the skyline even as the scene prepares to overturn its promise. When the trench collapses and he sees a mutilated woman’s body in the mud, the towers above him no longer suggest wealth or modern ambition. They gather instead like cemetery headstones, recasting the landscape he admired as a landscape of death.

A skyline transformed into a graveyard

The final change in the image is bound to the American’s altered view from inside the collapsing trench. In the mud, an apparently reaching arm proves to be detached, and a woman’s body emerges without its head or limbs; when he looks upward again, the towers have become headstones. The movement from ancient stones to modern towers thus ends not in a general comparison but in a sudden visual recoding: structures first read as signs of wealth and human ambition now frame the sight of mutilated dead. The image makes the skyline’s monumental scale inseparable from the buried bodies beneath it.

The image as an ironic measure

The standing-stones motif gives the American’s confidence a visual measure: he recognizes the skyline as a monument to wealth and feels kinship with its worship, but the same monumental forms acquire a radically different force when the ground gives way beneath him. The image’s return does not erase the towers’ grandeur; it makes that grandeur coexist with the exposed dead. By joining an ancient ritual landscape, a modern financial skyline, and a cemetery in one shifting comparison, the prologue makes the American’s sense of mastery provisional: the structures he reads as emblems of power become witnesses to what lies buried below.

The motif as foreshadowing

The image’s progression shapes the prologue’s suspense: the Scottish stones first enter as a private memory, then offer the American a way to read the rising skyline, before the trench collapse forces the comparison into a bodily horror he cannot master. This sequence delays the full meaning of the cemetery image until the dead are literally exposed in the mud. The towers remain above him, but their changed appearance joins the distant view to the immediate discovery, making the prologue’s opening analogy a frame for the revelation rather than a detached description.