Volume 2Chapter 17: Hair

The cave was not far from the boat. I saw a large hole blasted in the seabed, and the cave was at the bottom of the hole. I thought to myself, “This is definitely Uncle San’s work. We searched around the cave first, and there was no sign of collapse. It seems that Uncle San’s skills have not deteriorated.

I also saw a few stone anchors, which looked very similar to what Uncle San had described, but I couldn’t be sure that they were the ones Uncle San had mentioned.

The traces of the underground palace planned by Uncle San were still there. Zhang Tu and I both took careful note of them. Judging from the location of the cave, it should be dug down to the ear chamber, where the bricks should be relatively thin.

We searched for about five minutes, and it seemed that there was no need to continue searching. The fat man waved his hand at me, meaning that we should go in now. Ning looked at the dive watch and nodded.

Our equipment is not as good as it was 20 years ago. We checked our equipment and agreed on a secret code at the entrance. After making sure everything was in order, the fat guy calmed down and was the first to enter. We followed with our flashlights, and suddenly we were five or six meters underwater.

The cave was irregular, sometimes wide and sometimes narrow. As I swam along, I looked at the walls of the cave, and the more I looked, the more strange it seemed. It didn’t look like it was dug by a human. If it was dug by Uncle San, he would have dug it neatly with a shovel, but now the marks on the walls were messy and uneven, like they were dug by an animal.

We swam for more than 20 meters, but the light from the entrance was no longer visible. At this time, the direction of the cave suddenly changed, and it was dug vertically. I couldn’t help but feel a little strange. Since we hadn’t reached the tomb yet, why change the direction?

Since we couldn’t talk, I couldn’t express my doubts. We took a break at the vertical entrance. The fat guy made a careful gesture to us, then swam down first. I saw his light go down and down until it became a small dot, and I couldn’t help but be amazed. I thought to myself, how deep is this?

At this time, he shook the torch down below to show that it was safe. We immediately went down one by one. I looked at the dive watch and saw that it was already more than ten meters deep. I had never dived this deep before, and I didn’t know if my body could hold up.

We immediately saw the tomb wall of the ancient tomb, with a large hole in it. I was even more puzzled. The hole was so irregularly broken, unlike the careful unloading of pieces of a general tomb, and several bricks had even been cracked. The fat guy looked at me, and I looked at him. The two of us spit out a few bubbles together. He pointed at the broken bricks and made a monkey’s gesture. I knew he was trying to say that the hole might have been dug by a sea monkey, not a thief.

I nodded in agreement and pointed at the underwater air gun on his back. He took it off, pulled the safety, and swam into the hole.

This was the second time I had entered an ancient tomb. Although I was a little excited, I still felt uneasy when I thought about my previous experience. Especially underwater, the resistance of my hands and feet was very great. If I encountered danger, I was afraid that I would not be able to escape as quickly as I could on land.

The tomb passage was much larger than I had imagined. I turned up the brightness of the searchlight and turned on the waterproof flashlight in my hand. Following the fat man’s buttocks, our lights were very bright, shining far away in an instant, and the entire tomb passage was lit up. I saw that there were indeed reliefs of human faces on the tomb wall, as Uncle San had said. Not only that, but there were also strange animals carved on the foreheads of these reliefs, and they were very delicately carved. I swam and looked at them, and the more I looked, the more strange I felt. Most of these animals were tomb town beasts, but none of them had eyes carved on them, which looked a bit strange.

At this time, I suddenly saw a human face with three snake-like copper fish carved on its forehead. I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous, so I quickly pulled the fat man to stop and then went to study the relief.

The fat guy was in a hurry to go inside, impatient and not knowing what I had discovered. He turned around and looked at it a few times, but couldn’t see anything. He was so anxious that he waved his hands. I told him to wait and to look carefully. I saw three snake-eyed bronze fish heads connected at the end, forming a ring. Each one was different in shape. I could see that two of them were in my bag, and there was one with three eyes, which I had never seen before. I didn’t know what this was a hint of. The face below the fish was different from the others. It was a face with obvious female features, but because of the many things attached to it, the face looked a bit broken. It was not very comfortable.

I wanted to study it more carefully, but at this time, Aning behind me was also urging me. I had no choice but to continue swimming forward. Fortunately, the carving appeared at intervals, and I could still take a few more looks. After looking back and forth, I didn’t find anything more, but I vaguely felt that there was something wrong somewhere.

After looking for a while, I noticed the problem when I counted the fifth time the face appeared. I remembered that the eyes on the first stone slab were closed, on the second slab they seemed to be opening, on the third and fourth slabs they were opening wider and wider, and now on the fifth slab they were almost completely open.

I felt a little bit bad, so I stopped the fat guy from going any further and took out my underwater drawing board. I wrote on it, “The eyes on the face on the tomb wall are gradually opening up. I’m afraid there’s a problem!” I pointed at the wall after I finished writing.

The fat guy touched the face and shook his head. He wrote, “I didn’t notice it. It’s just some stone relief. It must be a whole stone inside. You’re thinking too much.”

I shook my head firmly and told him to pick up the gun. He looked at me and saw that I was serious, so he did as I said. After a while, I saw the same relief appear in front of me. The fat guy was a little scared by what I said and stopped. He first shone the light on it. The eyes of the stone face were completely open, and the whole face was facing forward, with a straight gaze. It looked a little dull. The fat guy looked back and forth, but there was no change. He plucked up his courage and walked over, touched it, and then made a gesture to me that everything was fine.

I swam over to take a look, and sure enough, it was still a whole piece of stone, nothing special. I poked at its two eyes with my finger, but there was no reaction. I shook my head in self-derision. It seems that this is just a gimmick played by the tomb’s designer to scare off tomb robbers who might come in. There is no special meaning. I actually scared myself here, and it’s really nothing to be proud of. The fat guy patted me on the back, signaling me not to think so much and to hurry up.

We continued to swim forward, and I remembered what my uncle had told me: he had hit a mechanism and been sucked into the spring. But the tomb walls were all the same, so how could he find the one he had hit?

My mind was racing. It was no use just swimming forward like this. I didn’t know where this tunnel led to. It might be a loop. If we got lost in there, we’d be finished. I figured that if Uncle San could see the end of the tunnel, it must be a long corridor. We had just taken a few turns, and there were only two such corridors. In that case, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find, but it would take some time.

At this time, the fat man in front of me stopped, and I couldn’t stop in time and hit his butt. I thought something was wrong in front of me, so I quickly got my nerves together and looked closer. It turned out that the tomb passage had come to an end, and the way ahead was blocked by a stone slab.

The stone slab was bare, with no writing or reliefs on it. I touched it for a long time, but couldn’t find any mechanism. I couldn’t help scratching my head. Then Ah Ning wrote to me and asked, “How could it be a dead end?”

I wrote back, “There are stone mechanisms nearby. Let’s look around and see if there are any loose tomb walls.”

They all nodded, and the fat guy started knocking here and there, carefully examining the reliefs of human faces. I recalled all the clues mentioned in my notes, and even used a dagger to scratch every gap on the side, but there was no progress. The stone slab was still blocking the way, not moving an inch.

I was a little depressed, and turned to see how the fat man was doing. I found that the fat man was actually staring blankly there. I patted him and asked him, “Did you find anything?”

He looked at me with a strange expression and asked me, “Do sea monkeys have long hair?”

I didn’t know what he meant by this sudden question, and couldn’t help laughing. I didn’t really pay attention to whether sea monkeys have long hair or not. My memory seemed to be that the whole head was bald, full of scales.

I told him the truth and asked him why he was asking. He pointed at the crack in the wall, and I looked at it with his finger. I immediately saw that a strand of black hair was floating out of the gap between the stone slab and the tomb passage.

I was stunned in surprise. How could this be possible? Could it be that there was someone on the other side of the stone slab?

Fatty had a lot of courage and wanted to reach out and pull it. He didn’t expect the hair to suddenly shrink and shrink back into the gap. Fatty looked at me and wrote, “There’s a ghost behind the stone slab.”