Volume 6 Chapter 3 WHO ARE YOU?

Following the instructions of the locals, Uncle San walked along an unknown trail that had been used by the ancestors for about four days. One third of the trail was carved into the cliff, and he estimated that it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. It was probably a plank road for marching, but now it was covered with moss and vegetation, and the further you went, the more crude the construction became.

The trail continued deep into the forest, and the outer section was still frequently used by mountain villagers. After passing through the area of Guizi Village, the road further in was almost untouched, with collapses and collapses, covered with vines and almost impossible to move forward.

With his obsessive energy, Uncle San managed to cross this ancient path several times and finally reached the other side of the cliff. He looked down from his vantage point and saw the valley that he had recorded in his notebook. After twenty years of changes, the footprints of his grandfather and the others had long since disappeared under the extremely lush canopy of trees. However, a red bare earthen mound in the middle of the valley stood out very prominently, extremely conspicuous, telling him that this was the legendary Dabaoling.

At the same time, he also saw that there seemed to be something strange standing under the canopy of trees on one side of the red earthen mound. Because the color was similar to the canopy, he couldn’t tell what it was at his height.

He vaguely sensed that something was wrong. This was a rarely visited valley, and no traces of human activity or construction should be here. So he climbed a few steps higher and took out his binoculars to take a look.

At first glance, he froze in place. He saw a few military tents scattered under the canopy of trees on the edge of the mound. The tents were camouflage-painted, so it was difficult to distinguish them from a distance. If it weren’t for Uncle San’s sensitivity to the subtle differences in color and oddities in the appraisal of the artifacts, he might have missed it.

At that moment, Uncle San thought to himself, “How could there be people in this godforsaken place? And they had set up tents. They couldn’t be hunters, because hunters wouldn’t come to such a deep place.

He was wondering. Suddenly one of the tents shook, and a man came out. Uncle San looked through his binoculars and was even more puzzled.

The man who came out had brown hair and four-cornered gold thread on his body.

At that time, Uncle San could not distinguish between the different ethnic groups of the East and the West, but at that time, the reform had just opened up, and there were not many foreigners in China. The most were adventurous Americans, so he did not consider it and decided that this foreigner was an American.

He thought at the time that there was a problem with someone in this place. Now there is not only someone, but also a foreign devil. What are they doing here? Is it the American empire that has come to cause destruction? Or is it also for the ancient tombs under the Dabaoling area?

But although foreigners are known to be antique collectors, they wouldn’t dig up the tombs themselves. They hadn’t read the old man’s notes, so how could they know there were tombs here?

This was completely out of the question, and Uncle San couldn’t think of a single reason why. He was extremely puzzled.

He climbed down the cliff with his doubts, put down his equipment, and slipped through the undergrowth below, sneaking up to the tents. He found that the camp of these foreigners was on the edge of the red mound, with about four tents. He estimated that there would not be many people, and there were a few Chinese people who looked like locals smoking and resting. He also saw that a large pit had been dug in the mound, covered with a bamboo frame and a green waterproof sheet.

The red mound on one side should be the mound of earth from that year. The soil should have been fried and mixed with a kind of medicine to prevent plants from growing, but now, when he looked closer, there were still a lot of weeds growing, which obviously showed that the ancients underestimated the adaptability of plants.

Seeing the funnel-shaped pit, Uncle San immediately understood that the purpose of these Americans was the same as his own.

At the time, Uncle San was not very old, and when he saw this situation, the only thing that came to his mind was that this might be a Chinese-American cooperative archaeological team that had come here to do archaeological excavations.

If you were from the Northern School, you would have to consider yourself unlucky at this time, because according to their rules, you should not compete with the government. If you encountered an archaeological team, what could you do? You couldn’t just go up and kill them all, but Uncle San was different. He was unwilling to let others get the upper hand like this. Looking at the location and intensity of the American excavation, he knew that these people had no experience as a grave robber, and were definitely following their own methods of digging cemeteries abroad to deal with ancient Chinese tombs. Digging like this would definitely not get them into the tomb. He just had to find the right place, dig a hole, and bring everything out before they entered the tomb.

Uncle San returned to the place where he had descended, and retrieved his equipment. It was getting late in the day, and he used his own footsteps as a ruler to measure the area around the mound in the valley, looking for the most suitable place to dig a hole.

The process was very complicated, and Uncle San didn’t go into detail. He only told me that he was very confident in himself at the time, and the only thing he was worried about was the situation in the tomb.

The hole that Grandpa dug would not have lasted long, and would have collapsed after a few rainy seasons. I don’t know how far they had gotten, whether they had reached the inner chamber of the tomb. If so, rainwater might have accumulated in the tomb, and the other burial objects might have rotted, except for the contents of the coffin. Whether the contents of the coffin had suffered damage depended on the quality of the coffin and the degree of sealing at the time.

After dark, the foreigners’ camp lit a bonfire. Uncle San waited quietly until they all fell asleep, then he carefully used his “cat shovel” to start digging.

The cat shovel is a special shovel used by earthworkers. It makes a very quiet sound when digging, but now the sharpness and sound of the engineering shovel is more advanced than the cat shovel, so the cat shovel has been retired from the stage of history.

Even so, Uncle San was very nervous when digging, because he could not use a Luoyang shovel to detect the situation underground (the sound would startle the birds). So he was not confident that he could find the outer extension of the ancient tomb in one go.

After digging for about two hours and going down about six meters, Uncle San’s shovel finally hit something hard. Just as he leaned over to shine his flashlight on it, he suddenly felt something wrong. A slight movement came from under the soil, and then the entire tunnel collapsed. He didn’t even have time to scream, and the soil covered his mouth and nose. Then he and the soil around him suddenly sank deep into the ground.