Volume 9 Chapter 2 Going deeper

My physical fitness is the worst among the people here. I should never have moved, but Uncle San knew this and still told me to go down. Obviously, he wasn’t going to let me do manual labor. I think he must have had his reasons. But smelling the smell of the well, I really didn’t want to go down.

But this was impossible. Everyone was looking at me. On the one hand, I was very curious about what was going on down there, and on the other hand, Black Glasses had said that there was no room for negotiation. I had no choice but to be escorted down the crack by Black Glasses.

Perhaps psychological factors strengthened my delusion. After descending, I immediately smelled a strong odor of urine, so strong that I could not breathe. Moreover, the channel was not as easy to walk as I thought. The angle was very large, and I saw that Uncle San had used all his strength to descend so smoothly. I slipped and immediately got covered in a lot of urine-mixed mud and moss, which made me frown.

The black-glasses guy above me laughed and said, “Sorry, buddy, but urine is good for the skin.”

“Damn, it’s a good thing you didn’t let them shit here,” I scolded.

He laughed, and the people above heard it and thought something was wrong. The rope stopped for a moment, and he immediately signaled them to continue lowering the rope.

It soon became pitch black, and because it was so narrow that I couldn’t even lift my head, I couldn’t see anything except for the flashlight in the black-glasses man’s hand. It was a good thing that we were descending, because it would have been even more exhausting to climb back up.

I looked at him and saw that he was still wearing dark glasses, so I couldn’t help but ask him, “Can you see with those things on?”

He smiled at me and said, “I can see better with them on than without.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but since he didn’t want to explain, I didn’t ask any more questions.

As we descended, we soon reached the mouth of the crack in the sand that we had seen from above. I shone my light inside and immediately discovered that there was a whole other world inside. It was a gap that only one person could pass through sideways, but once inside, I discovered that although the gap was very narrow, it was extremely deep, and it extended up and down and forward. It looked as if a huge mountain had been split in half, and I had crawled into the cleft that had been split.

What surprised me was that the walls of the crevice were full of pits like those in the grottoes, which were made by smashing the walls of the crevice with the entire piece of sand. Each pit was a ball of dry mud, stuck in the pit with mud and entwined with the roots around it. The mud was cracked, like dried soap.

Looking up, down, left and right, I saw that these depressions were everywhere, and as I shone my flashlight around, I saw that wherever there was light in the crevices, there were these depressions.

We squeezed into the crevice, and I touched the sand inside. It was hard as stone. These should be the soil deposits of the sand, very moist and rich in moisture. I squeezed in further, and suddenly I was at the edge of a mud cocoon. I wanted to touch it, but Black Glasses shouted at me, “Don’t touch these mud cocoon.”

“What’s inside these cocoons?” I asked.

“Dead people.” He took a look at one of them, which was a cracked mud cocoon with white bones exposed inside. ”Curved-limbed burial. This may have been the most primitive wellway built by the ancestors at the time. There were no stones, only some mountain cracks that were smoothed out with mud, and later used as tombs.”

“A tomb? In a place like this?” I wondered.

“It must have been a lot of work to build this. These people were probably slaves captured from other countries. They died here and couldn’t be transported out for burial, so they were buried on the spot. There are many along the Great Wall.” Black-glasses said, ”We’re here.”

I looked down, and the gap was far from the bottom, but on the side of the gap, a huge rock continued to crack open a gap. There was a flashlight shining, and it was obvious that Uncle San was inside.

Black-glasses signaled upwards, the rope stopped, and we carefully climbed down, and Uncle San reached out and pulled me in.

The crack was very narrow, and the worst part was that it was very low, probably only half a person’s height. I had to bend over to get in, and my feet hurt so much that I sat down on the ground as soon as I got in. Then Black Glasses also came in with his back bent.

I looked around and saw that on both sides of the crack were tiny tree roots and mud cocoons wrapped in dry mud, all huddled in the hollows and lined up on both sides. I could hear the sound of water flowing under the ruins. Looking further in, I discovered that the crack was on another stone well shaft. Apparently the earthquake had caused the sand layer to crack, and the crack had connected the two well shafts, which were very far apart, and we had taken a shortcut.

The inside of the well shaft was a mess, and it was also cracked everywhere. Obviously, when the ruins collapsed, countless cracks were formed.

I asked my uncle, “Why did you let me come down here?”

“I’m here to show you something,” he said, gesturing for me to follow him. We squatted down in the narrow gap and walked a few steps. He pointed with his flashlight at the sandy wall behind a tree root.

At first I couldn’t see what was there because it was all covered in tree roots. I looked closer and saw that someone had carved a line of characters on it, which looked like a few English letters. I was shocked and grabbed my uncle’s hand to make sure I was looking at it properly. I carefully identified it and let out a cry of “Oh my goodness.”

Uncle San said, “Look, is this the same as the mark left by your brother in Changbai Mountain?”

I nodded eagerly. This is the mark that the Mianyouping carved in Changbai Mountain. I cursed in my heart. Could it be that the Mianyouping had just been here?

“How did you find it?” I asked Uncle San.

He wiped the mud off his face and said, “Don’t worry about it. Are you sure this is the handwriting of the little brother, and not someone else carving similar marks?”

I didn’t understand what he meant, but nodded to show that I was sure. He immediately waved to Black Glasses: “Blind man, tell the people above to come down. We’ve found the entrance.”

The black-glasses man nodded, stepped back, and signaled to the people above.

I asked Uncle San what was going on, and he said, “Take a good look at this mark. Can you feel the difference between this and the mark carved on Changbai Mountain?”

“Different?” I couldn’t understand what my uncle meant at first, but when I looked closer, I suddenly noticed that the mark was gray.

The mark was carved into the sand, which was not suitable for carving anything because it was hard but very brittle. If you used too little force, you wouldn’t be able to carve a mark. If you used too much force, the whole piece of sand might crack. The mark is a bit complicated, and it was obviously carved with great care. The gray color is the result of the sand oxidizing over the years. The gray tone in the mark is almost the same as the surrounding sand, which means that the mark has obviously been here for a long time.

“No,” I said, ”is this an old mark? Let me take another look…”

Uncle San said, “No need to look. Since the handwriting is the same, there’s no mistake. This is his mark, but it wasn’t made recently. It was left by him the last time he came here.”