Volume 7 Chapter 24: The Queen Mother’s Jar

I had been listening to that spiteful, sneering signal for over an hour, and my mind had almost become accustomed to the sound. Now that the boat was suddenly quiet, I felt a little out of place. I don’t know why, but now I heard the same sound in the darkness around me. I had always felt that the sound was not right, and when I heard it now, I felt very strange.

Although I felt that it might be a hallucination, I still didn’t want to take it for granted in this place. I zipped up my jacket, turned on my flashlight, and walked behind the rock to take a look.

The rock was irregular, and I didn’t know what kind of rock it was. There were only mounds of earth here, and I didn’t know where these rocks came from.

It was dark behind the rock, and there was a blind spot that the flashlight couldn’t reach. I walked around to take a look, but I didn’t see anything. The gap behind the rock was very small, and it was unlikely that anything could be hidden there. I kicked the rock and found it to be unstable. I looked around again, but didn’t see anything. Everything was very quiet, so I thought to myself that I might have heard it wrong. I shook my head and walked back. Aning asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I might have been a little jumpy and thought there was something there.

I sat back down by the fire to warm myself, and we didn’t say anything. I leaned against the rock, and I just wanted to close my eyes and rest, afraid that there would be something else that would require our help. However, tiredness set in, and I soon became a little drowsy. I don’t know when I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was already dawn, but it wasn’t very bright, as if it were early morning. At this time, the wind had completely stopped, and I heard Tashi’s voice. I got up and saw that they had all come in, as if the camp outside had been moved in, with tents and campfires set up all around. The Caucasians had been moved into the tent, and Aning was still resting in the sleeping bag on the side.

I had a blanket on me, but I didn’t know who had put it there. I struggled to get up, yawning and looking around. At first glance, I was attracted by the scenery of the wind-eroded rocks around me, and I couldn’t help but be stunned.

The view of the Devil’s City during the day is extremely wide, and the wind-eroded rocks around it are much more spectacular than they look at night. The huge rocks that rise up from the ground are like pyramids standing around us. The rocks that looked black at night now showed all kinds of strange shapes. Combined with the infinite expanse of the Gobi, this sense of grandeur is indescribable.

This is not the adult Yadan landform. If it is further tempered by the wind and sand for another million years, how spectacular will the scenery be?

I looked at it in a daze for a while before I came back to my senses and noticed the people around me. They were carrying things out of the sunken ship on the mound. The mound from last night was much taller than the one I saw. Nails and ropes had been attached to it to make it easier to climb, and a basket had been made.

Ding Zhuoma and her daughter-in-law had made breakfast and butter tea. When she saw me wake up, she made a gesture for me to go and eat. I went over, had a cup of tea, took a piece of bread, and walked over to Wu Laosi to ask what they were doing.

Wu Laosi, who had heard that I was a member of the same trade and had come to recruit Jude, liked me a little. He nodded when he saw me coming and said to me that the Caucasian’s injury was more serious. The team doctor was still examining the wound on his abdomen, and there were signs of infection, so the team might have to retreat and reorganize before making any plans. They didn’t want to go back empty-handed. This shipwreck was also a major discovery. They wanted to record it and take some things out to inform the company.

I sat down next to him and looked up at the sunken ship. It was huge! At night, it didn’t feel this big. It looked like a regular merchant ship. The head of the ship had probably been exposed when the mound collapsed in the past, and it was propped up in the air.

I looked down again at the things they had cleaned out of it. Each of the clay pots was as big as a toilet, and surprisingly, none of them were damaged. It seems that the shipwreck was very slow. The pots have unique patterns from the Western Regions, some are black patterns, some are similar to writing, none of them are Han Chinese. I asked what they were, and Wu Laosi shook his head and said no one knew. The culture of the Western Regions is very special, very mysterious, and very rare. The Western Regions have a history of more than 5,000 years, and so many ancient cities have been buried by the yellow sands of the Gobi. In the past, the Koko Xili and Taklamakan were both called the Western Wilderness, and the population was very sparse. It is now very difficult to study.

“However, the history of these ancient pottery is quite long. Generally, we trade in porcelain in the Western Regions. These pottery jars are the products of the peak of pottery development and should be from before the Tang Dynasty. I don’t know if they were transported from the Central Plains to the Western Regions, or from the Western Regions to the Arab world. This area should already be the territory of the Western Queen Mother’s country. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the Western Queen Mother’s country.” The other man with glasses said.

Old Wu nodded in agreement, saying, “I also feel that it is very likely. You see,” he pointed to the pattern on a clay pot, which was a bird pattern, “this is the totem of the Queen Mother of the West in legend, the three blue birds. Of course, it is not ruled out that people from other countries would also use it. Because at that time, the country of the Queen Mother of the West was still the spiritual center of the Western Regions, and because of its strange mystery, even though it was no longer as powerful as it had been during the Zhou Dynasty, other countries still revered the legendary magic of the Queen Mother of the West and came to worship her, or at least to pay formal respects to her.

I was completely uninterested in this, and it was all in the realm of archaeology, so I interrupted them and asked, “So what’s in this jar? It can’t be empty, that would be a waste.”

The mouth of the jar was sealed with a special kind of clay, green and black, a bit like the clay seal on a wine jar. I sniffed it, it had a spicy flavor, it felt familiar, I moved it around, the jar was heavy, there must be something inside, but it wasn’t liquid.

I asked them why they didn’t open it? Wu Laosi said that they try not to damage these intact ones, and later on, if there are any damaged ones, they won’t open them. In case the contents are precious and can’t stand oxidation, this can save some effort and prevent archaeological waste.

I laughed and thought to myself that Uncle San and his men don’t have this set of rules. If it were Fat Man, he would definitely smash it open without any explanation.

But we have to respect other people’s ways of doing things. After I finished the last bite of bread, I told him that you guys do it first, and when you find the jar, call me when you open it. I walked over to the Caucasian’s tent to see how he was doing.

I found it cramped when I walked in, and only after a closer look did I realize that the other two bodies had also been moved down and were lying on one side covered with a thermal blanket. The team doctor had not slept all night, and his eyelids were noticeably dark. He was taking the Caucasian’s temperature.

I asked him about the situation, and he told me that the man was very confused and talking nonsense, but that he was better than before. Suffocation and lack of oxygen should not be a problem, but the strange wounds on his stomach… He asked me to look at the two corpses, which also had the same wounds, one on the chest and one on the inside of the thigh, both of which had a small amount of blood, but there were no holes in the outer clothing, so I didn’t know how they were produced.

I walked over to the Caucasian man. He was pale and sweating, but he no longer needed the ventilator. He was clearly stable. I saw his lips moving, as if he was saying something. I leaned in to listen, but it wasn’t Chinese. It sounded like English.

“What is he saying?” I asked the team doctor. My English is not very good. I can do business, but I can’t understand nonsense.

The team doctor shook his head and said he couldn’t hear it clearly either. His English wasn’t very good either. But after his consciousness returned a little, the Caucasian kept saying this.

I leaned over to listen, but I couldn’t make it out, so I gave up. I walked out of the tent and wanted to go back to sleep, since I didn’t have anything to do here anyway.

When I got to my sleeping place, I lay down and thought about what happened last night. I don’t know how long I slept, but suddenly I heard someone calling my name. I sat up and looked around. I saw a lot of people gathered around Wulaosi, who was waving at me as if he had something to tell me.

I got up and walked over. As I got closer, I smelled a very strange smell. It wasn’t exactly smelly, but it made my throat feel very hot and uncomfortable, as if I had breathed in sulfuric acid. I held my nose and leaned closer to see what it was. It turned out that they had found some broken jars and were smashing them.

More than ten jars had already been smashed, and Wu Laosi was pouring out the contents of each one. The first thing I saw was mud fragments, all black and dry. Among these mud fragments were a few balls of dirt, all covered in mud, which was very disgusting. Strangely, I saw that the surface of these balls was covered in a lot of black hair, which looked very wrong.

There were already more than a dozen balls of dirt piled up, and I didn’t know what they were. I thought to myself, could it be that the watermelons from that year have now turned into stones?

As I got closer and took a closer look, I felt a wave of suffocation. I discovered that the mud balls were actually human heads wrapped in dried mud, and the black hair was actually the hair of human heads.