Volume 7 Chapter 28: Heading for the Oasis (Part 1)

The scene before us was so spectacular that words could not express it. We were all stunned. Although Wenjin’s notes mentioned such an oasis, it was not what I had in mind.

The basin was very large and looked very neat. The fat man said it looked like a meteor crater. Looking down from the cliff, we could only see a dense canopy of trees surrounded by smoke, and we could not see the specific situation.

This must be Tamudu. I never thought we would discover it in such a way. It seems a bit too simple.

Pan Zi reversed the car and we looked at the basin with binoculars while wondering what was going on.

Pan Zi said, “It seems that the rock mountain that Dingzhu Zhuoma and Wenjin separated from has indeed disappeared. This is the Yange area. It may have been a rock mountain, but after a few decades of rain, it has become a mound of earth. However, following the direction of the river, we can still find it here.”

These notes of Wenjin’s were not written, and I couldn’t possibly know. However, now that we have discovered this oasis, we are a bit overwhelmed. I asked Pan Zi what our plan was.

Pan Zi said that he definitely had to go down and take a look. After hearing about the notes and the message from Dingzhu Zhuoma, he knew that Wenjin must be down there. He said that they couldn’t wait for the third master to join them, and they had to go down and take a look at the situation first. Wenjin was the master’s wife, and if they missed her because they were waiting for the third master, he wouldn’t have to be a servant anymore. Time was running out.

I thought to myself, you really are a loyal follower of the 24 Filial Piety, but I think the same way. Time is running out. In fact, ten days is almost upon us. I asked a few people, and they all had no objections. They let me see how to get into the basin.

Wen Jin’s notes had a detailed description of the route. They entered the basin through a canyon. However, the topography here has completely changed. It seems that we can’t find that canyon through her route description. We can only drive around the basin to find it. After many twists and turns, we finally found a wide canyon.

After a big detour, we found the entrance to the canyon about 4 kilometers from the basin. The first part of the canyon was accessible by car, so we drove all the way in until the rocks blocked the way.

Then a few of us got out of the car, put on our equipment and continued on foot. We didn’t stop until we saw trees. I took out Wenjin’s notes and read them carefully.

After reading the notes, I couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty. From the things recorded in Wenjin’s notes, I deduced that this canyon was very dangerous. As we went further into the canyon, the altitude dropped, tropical vegetation grew thick, and the air was filled with miasma. Our gas masks might not be able to cope with such a humid environment, and this was the only entrance to the Xiwangmu Palace. The things we encountered along the way made me feel that the Xiwangmu Palace was very strange, and I expected that the road would not be easy to traverse.

However, in comparison, what I was most worried about was what would happen after we passed through the canyon. The end of the canyon is the core area of the oasis, where the rivers converge. The dense canopy of trees below the ravine is full of damp swamps, and the strange landforms here almost form a tropical rainforest in the Gobi. Although we know that the ancient city of the Queen Mother of the West is somewhere in the swamp, searching inside is almost a death sentence.

We looked at the general route Wenjin had described in his notes in the shade of the canyon. Because we had not entered the swamp, we were confused in many places, and Wenjin had drawn question marks in many places. We didn’t know what the question marks represented, which made us very uneasy. In the end, we could only decide to take one step at a time.

Afterwards, we each did our own preparations. When searching, we knew that the road ahead was long, and we had to control our consumption of supplies. Now that we were entering the backyard of the Queen Mother of the West, we naturally couldn’t care so much. We loaded in everything we could bring, including flares, cold fireworks, matches, and medicine.

Pan Zi had fought in Vietnam and was now our consultant. He said that from the cliff, the situation here should be similar to the tropical rainforests in Vietnam. The swamp in this humid zone is the most dangerous. The canopy of the virgin rainforest above almost covers the entire valley floor. With such dense vegetation, there is no sunlight below, and it is dark and full of miasma under the canopy. Although the temperature here is over 30 degrees, we must wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants, otherwise you won’t have a single piece of good meat on your body in an hour.

A-ning said, “I have mosquito repellent. Will that work?

Pan Zi said that you can repel mosquitoes, but that thing will attract other things. Don’t use too strong a smell in the rainforest. Otherwise, even if you don’t encounter wild animals at the time, they will follow you all the way. This time, only I brought a gun, and even if I encounter a wild boar, it will be useless.

He finally said that once you enter the swamp, don’t wade in the water or touch the mud unless you have no choice. He had a comrade who got his foot stuck in the swamp during an ambush. It was less than a minute before he was able to pull it out, but when he did, his whole leg was full of holes, eaten away by something. In the current environment, if something like this happens, it’s tantamount to death, and maybe it’s better to die.

I felt from Pan Zi’s eyes that he wasn’t exaggerating, and I felt a little strange in my heart, so I tightened my pants a little more.

After two hours, we had packed up everything and were ready to go. Pan Zi led the way, followed by the rest of us, cutting branches and leaves as we headed deeper into the canyon. As soon as we started walking, the sky turned cloudy again, as if it was going to rain. I thought to myself, the wonders of nature are truly inexhaustible. In the depths of the arid Qaidam Basin, there is such a humid and rainy oasis. It is truly a creation of nature, unconventional.

This canyon is not like the kind of Yadan canyon we saw in the Devil City, which was not carved by the wind, but seems to be a rift valley created by geological movement. The bottom of the valley is not flat, with strange rocks and layers of rocks, and the rock walls seem to have been carved by a sharp knife. However, if I had to say, I would agree with the fat man’s statement. The terrain here is really like a meteorite crater. The rift valley is like a crack in the earth’s crust caused by a meteorite falling, which may have been much deeper than it is now. Such canyons should not be the only ones around this pit valley.

The canyon is very wide. After entering the dense forest, the surroundings became very hot and humid, and we were sweating all over. Moss covered the rocks and trees everywhere, making it impossible to stand on solid ground. Our feet were already covered in wet mud and tangled roots, walking in a web of monster tentacles, with a pit under each foot. The canopy above our heads was so dense that we couldn’t see the sunlight. Suddenly I had a very serious delusion. Am I really on the Tibetan Plateau, not in the Amazon jungle?

I thought this would only happen at the end of the canyon, but I didn’t expect it to be like this in the middle of the canyon. The situation in the ravine is probably even worse.

The fat guy was panting and said that he didn’t know if there were any animals in this oasis. He said that it would be a kind of welfare to kill a few and eat them, otherwise it would be a waste of time walking.

Pan Zi said that the rainforest in this closed environment was not small, but not large either. I’m afraid there won’t be any large wild animals, and the most I’m afraid of are still insects and worms. In many such swamps, snakes are the most common.

The fat man said that snakes are also good. In Guangdong, I’ve even eaten grilled scorpions. Anyway, as long as it’s fresh, I’m not afraid.

I remembered Wen Jin’s note: “There are many snakes in the mud, and I’m not afraid of meeting people.” Pan Zi was probably right. I don’t know the size of these snakes, but in many Hollywood movies, some pythons can grow as thick as an old tree and can’t be crushed by a road roller.

Moreover, the ecological environment here is very special. It is a closed land-based island. I think that except for birds and humans, nothing else can possibly enter here. The creatures here have been breeding here since the oasis was formed. At that time, Qaidam was still a land of rivers and abundant species. Perhaps we can discover many extinct animals and plants in this oasis, which may be more valuable than the things in the Xiwangmu Palace.

On second thought, I decided not to. In the legend of the Queen Mother of the West in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the palace of the Queen Mother of the West is guarded by a group of human-faced blue birds. This must be a huge bird of prey that we don’t understand. It might be the strange bird that attacked us in Changbai Mountain. It’s better if this kind of thing is extinct.

Because the trees are too dense, and we are in a canyon, there is no way to go around, so we can only cut down the old vines and broad-leaved trees while moving forward. This is very exhausting, and even if Fatso and Mung Oil Bottle take turns clearing the way, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Fortunately, the jagged cliffs on the sides of the canyon are framed by a blue sky, like a blue brocade belt, and the scenery is very beautiful. From time to time, waterfalls formed by the heavy rain the day before pour down, and we didn’t get bored along the way.

After walking for a while, we discovered that there were many caves on the cliffs ahead, densely packed, with more than a hundred, covered with moss, and we didn’t know what was carved inside.

We suddenly became nervous and lost our interest in the scenery. We had not seen any traces of the Xiwangmu Kingdom along the way, and we had always felt that it was not real. Now that we had suddenly seen it, we really felt that we were approaching the core of this mysterious ancient kingdom. This should be an exciting thing, but when we actually saw it, we felt a little scared.

We put away our playful mood and went up to check it out. The caves were of different sizes, with the larger ones being big enough to fit two Jiefang trucks side by side. The smaller ones were only half as tall as a person, and were very different from those in Dunhuang. The caves were very shallow, and the statues inside could be seen from the outside, but were completely covered in thick moss.

I climbed up and took out my dagger, and began scraping away the moss covering one of the caves.