by Xu, Lei
Still, we needed to find evidence to verify the hypothesis. We had to locate the underground tunnel and uncover some trace of the extensive equipment that must have been previously amassed here. The colonel said they’d already found large amounts of antifreeze residue nearby. That seemed to satisfy the second prerequisite. As for the first, the engineering corps was now conducting a wide-ranging search of the area. A group would be organized once the tunnel was located. They would then make their way underground to find out just what was down there. At last, this was the reason we were here.
The meeting ended. The colonel repeated our oath of secrecy and told us we were free to wander about the camp. As soon as he left, the entire tent erupted like a pot boiling over. It wasn’t that we were afraid—when it came to cave exploration, we were all experienced and fear was out of the question. No, we were excited. As I’ve said before, prospecting can be a dull line of work. This opportunity was more than a little enticing.
Later, after returning to our tents, we were still too keyed up to sleep. Only Old Cat went to bed. The rest of us, even though we were exhausted, stayed up all night, soaking in the excitement, discussing the job, and letting off steam. Looking back, though, it seems a little strange that in all our discussions no one ever asked why the Japanese would expend so much effort to move an entire plane deep underground. The Japanese obviously considered the prospecting records regarding this location exceptionally important—locked as they were within a coded steel box. Judging from the remains left at this camp, though, it was clear the Japanese had only engaged in common geological exploration work before they suddenly decided to carry out this seemingly impossible act. What had they found? What made them do it? I suspect this question was on everyone’s mind, but we knew that there was no sense in discussing it. So we chose to let it go.
CHAPTER 5
The Cave
The entirety of the engineering corps was dispatched to carpet the area. We asked to be included in the search, but the colonel firmly refused without any explanation. We became rather spoiled at camp, sitting around all day, excitedly or nervously guessing at what was to come, waiting for news from the forest. A discovery was made on the twelfth day. A unit of engineering corpsmen located a long-abandoned roadway on a mountain five kilometers from camp. After following it another three kilometers, they uncovered a large tectonic cave covered in cracks and fissures. The mouth of the cave had been concealed beneath a canvas sheet hidden under a layer of fallen leaves. The soldiers had only found the cave when they stepped on top of the canvas. The opening yawned ninety feet wide and appeared to be a vertical drop for at least the initial eighty to ninety feet, though the engineering corpsmen weren’t carrying the right equipment to explore too deeply.
At noon the colonel made an announcement: we would set out the day after next. He asked us to make the appropriate preparations. This pushed most of us to the peak of anticipation, but our nervousness intensified as well. Caves are some of the world’s most hazardous locations. We were used to exploring them, but that made us only more aware of their danger. The chatter that had filled our days screeched to a halt. With each of us attending to his own responsibilities, the whole camp soon took on an orderly, professional atmosphere.
As the days passed, I felt an increasing admiration for Old Cat. Although I seemed to notice a trace of anger in his eyes, despite the excitement all around, he just carried on in the same brazen and rather shameless way, with that slight smirk playing across his lips, as if he didn’t care about anything at all. While everyone else was bustling about in preparation for the expedition, he stood apart, watching us from the cabin steps and barely lifting a finger. He always seemed to know something that I didn’t, and there was nothing favorable in his expression as he watched us.
Every generation is typified by a certain kind of person, and so it was with Old Cat: he characterized the times that he lived in. In the early days of the war, this old guard was privy to many things no one should ever have to see. They learned the truths that lie below the surface of our world, truths that they found themselves powerless to change. Perceptive and clever, a guy like Old Cat took pleasure in being aware while everyone else went around in a daze. He delighted in his hard-won knowledge and would never deign to rouse you from your stupor. Of course, all of these reflections were made many years later. At the time I was curious about Old Cat, like an adolescent around some rock star. I wanted only to get closer, hoping to somehow become just like him.
That night I made up my mind to ask Old Cat what he was thinking. At first he just laughed at me and said nothing, but after I handed over some cigarettes, he softened. He smoked a few, then told me that this thing we were doing, there was something wrong about it. First of all, he said, that cave had definitely been discovered before we arrived, otherwise they would never have transferred so many people here so urgently. After being in the area for such a long time, could they really have only discovered it just now? Second, he was sure that there were branching paths in the depths of the cave, otherwise they wouldn’t need so many men. He didn’t know what sort of tricks the leaders of the 723 Project were playing, but whatever they were, they weren’t telling us. It was all extremely strange, he said, especially the plane hidden underground—that was simply too much. The situation gave him a bad feeling. After he finished he gave me a pat on the back and, looking right at me, told me that whatever came next, I’d better be extremely careful.
I didn’t say anything, but his suspicion made me think less of him. He was overthinking the situation, I told myself. Of course there was nothing simple about what was happening, otherwise they wouldn’t have needed so many men and so much equipment. Even if they didn’t tell us everything, I figured those in charge had reasons for concealing this information. I didn’t think too much about it. We took the next day to rest, reorganize, and hold target practice. Then, on the third day, we joined up with a large contingent of engineering corpsmen and set off for the saddle ridge, me with a smile on my face.
We didn’t have any pack animals—just one dog—so we had to proceed on foot, each man with a heavy load on his back. The cave was supposed to be a full day’s hike from camp. At some point along the way, I realized Old Cat wasn’t with us. Some of my comrades told me the old bandit had claimed to be running a high fever. I could feel my stomach drop into my boots. He hadn’t been joking. Knowing he’d intentionally avoided going, the air around me suddenly seemed darker.
Still, it was better marching along than bouncing around in the back of a truck. Each of us had a rifle strapped to his back. Wang Sichuan told me this meant we were near the Mongolian border and not near the Soviets. The Soviet snipers might pick you off long-range if they saw that you had a gun. Our forces rarely carried arms near their border. But there were lots of roving bandits near Mongolia. You needed a gun for self-protection.
I dearly wanted to get a better idea of where exactly we were, but we stuck to the lower ridges that straddled the gaps between mountains and there was never a view. The built-up layers of fallen leaves beneath us turned the ground to fetid swamp. With each step our feet came up covered in swollen masses of muck that belched black water. And with so many people, someone was always falling over and making us stop. We labored onward, our conversations dead and left behind. My thoughts of scenery withered. By the end, I had only the strength to keep my eyes on the back of the man in front of me.
We finally reached the cave on the afternoon of the second day. Immediately I realized Old Cat had been right: there was no way this cave had been found just two days before. Several tents had been erected and piles of knotted rope were strewn all about—two weeks wouldn’t have been enough time to transport this much equipment. The others didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. Honestly, had I not spoken with Old Cat, I wouldn’t have paid attention to these details either.
Great trees blocked out the sun, and the ground was covered in bushes. The mouth of the cave opened to the sky just behind
the massive, horizontal trunk of a dead tree. From some unknown source, long roots extended into the opening and climbed down its throat. This was a textbook example of a tectonic cave—a giant tear in the mountainside—not some common mountain cavern. Standing next to the opening, all we could see was a steep drop-off into pitch-black. The wind came whistling softly out of the pit. It was impossible to tell how deep it went. Where the sunlight fell upon the steep cave walls, it illuminated a host of ferns and lichen clinging to the rock. The opening chute seemed to be horn shaped, the emptiness below appearing even larger than the cave mouth. Engineering corpsmen had already placed a net over the opening. At its side was a system of pulleys hooked to a diesel engine that was now lowering basket after basket of army-green cloth bags into the hole. Evidently people were already inside.
The colonel told us the engineering corps had completed an initial exploration of the cave: The vertical drop continued for 642 feet. At its bottom ran an underground river. We would navigate it in inflated oxskin rafts. About two hundred feet down the river, the path branched in four directions. We’d have to divide into groups.
I could feel the sweat running down my brow and Old Cat’s words tugging at my heart—everything that son of a bitch had said was coming true.
CHAPTER 6
Splitting Up
So it went like this: There were twenty-three of us prospectors in total. We were going to be split into four groups of four, with the remaining seven acting as reserve and support. A few engineering corpsmen would also join each group for protection and to help carry equipment. There’s a big difference between prospectors and engineering corpsmen. Prospectors are special-technician troops attached to the wider geo-prospecting/engineering brigade, while engineering corpsmen are much more like standard troops with a little extra training. We had it much easier than they: far fewer military rules and regulations and a respectable military rank. We were the brains and they were the necessary brute force. Of course, we’d once been fit like them, but as our volume of work increased over the years, we let our conditioning slip. Now we needed the engineering corpsmen, especially during cave exploration. The ropes were extremely heavy, and we needed a great deal of them to get past the steep cliffs and wide crevasses we were likely to encounter. The more people available, the easier it was to travel great distances during exploration. The new enlistees could march thirty kilometers with twenty kilograms on their backs. I don’t know what exactly they were carrying, but they didn’t seem too distressed.
Remembering what Old Cat told me, I tried to stay toward the back of the group, hoping to be kept in reserve. The groups, however, were divided based on age. Being relatively young, I was placed in the second group with Wang Sichuan and two men from Shaanxi, Pei Qing and Chen Luohu. I’d worked with these men before at the massive oil-extraction project in Karamay, off in the Northwest. Later, we’d often run into each other when one of us was leaving a project and the other was going in. I’d never really gotten to know them before, but I guess we’d have the chance now.
Pei Qing was going prematurely gray. Although his pure white face made him look quite young, that silver hair gave him a fierce and imposing aspect. He had a bit of arrogance about him. It was said he was highly educated and the technical backbone of his unit. He didn’t talk much, but I heard he was a real lady-killer. Chen Luohu was Pei Qing’s polar opposite: he’d risen from the very bottom through hard work, but he still didn’t even speak proper Mandarin. He’d laugh like a donkey whenever anyone told a joke, no matter what it was about. “Aw, you don’t say! Isn’t that hilarious!” he’d guffaw. He could laugh all day about any little thing—which was quite entertaining for us—but there was also something treacherous about him, a sense of caution in how he approached everything, like an ambitious low-level bureaucrat. None of us relished having to deal with him.
Five men from the fourth squad of the sixth company of the Inner Mongolian engineering corps were coming with us. Their deputy squad leader’s name was something like “Kangmei,” but I’d never heard of the other four. We made no formal introductions at the time, just saluted, noted the fresh faces, and left it at that.
The deputy squad leader carried a Type 56 assault rifle (a Chinese copy of the Kalashnikov). The other four soldiers had Type 54 submachine guns, and they loaded us all down with ammo. Wang Sichuan told them they were being more than a little excessive: wild animals might be lurking in the caves of the South, but the most we’d find here were bats. The temperature in the cave was too low to support cold-blooded animals, and there was no way a larger animal, like a bear, would be able to negotiate the vertical descent. The only problems we needed to worry about were staying warm and having enough oxygen, though the engineering corpsmen didn’t seem to be preparing for that. Soldiers never listen to our advice.
We prospectors refused to carry guns and merely strapped on Sam Browne belts (wide leather belts with a shoulder strap). We were each assigned different pieces of equipment. I was given a geologist’s shovel and hammer, for which I felt fortunate, as each could be used for self-defense and neither was particularly heavy. Wang Sichuan was made to carry the cutlery. It clattered and jingled as he walked, and he made his dissatisfaction very clear to us.
After finishing our preparations, we were hooked to the towrope and lowered one by one into the mouth of the cave. I can still remember swinging back and forth, trying to keep my balance, for what seemed like hours. I prefer to swing down on my own. It’s much smoother than being lowered in by pulley. Honestly, scaling cliff faces has become fairly routine for me, and I wouldn’t consider a six-hundred-something-foot descent to be all that deep. I once climbed a cliff in Shandong far more formidable than this one. Sunlight illuminated the first stretch of the descent, but after ninety feet the cave began to twist and the sky disappeared. Fifteen or so feet below that, I entered into total darkness. I could see beams of light glimmering from the bottom. I glanced about at the cliff rock. It was clearly limestone from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, meaning this was a complex cave—in possession of the features of both limestone and tectonic caves. The cave bottom was as big as a soccer field and, as I neared the ground, I could see it was mostly covered by slow-moving water. An underground river—a common feature of limestone karst caves.
Many provisional steel shelves had been erected on the cave floor. I wasn’t sure whether the Japanese had left them or if we’d set them up. The shelves were packed with large gas lamps and the army-green bags that had been lowered earlier. Engineering corpsmen were busy unpacking the oxskin rafts from inside the bags. Several had already been blown up and were calmly floating atop the dark river. The water itself didn’t appear very deep. Many soldiers were standing in the river with rubber galoshes. Wang Sichuan had descended before me and was off to one side, shining his flashlight across the cave walls. He’d even lit up a cigarette.
As soon as I touched down, my professional habits took over. I flipped on my flashlight and joined those around me in scanning about the dark cave. Years ago, when I first became a prospector, caves held a strong sense of enchantment for me. I loved standing amid those dark walls, running my fingers across the earth’s secrets. I always felt as if I’d come to a place that did not belong to the human world. We prospectors often considered caves the blood vessels of the mountains. While exploring their deep tunnels, we sometimes felt a strange sort of air, almost like breath, pass over us. How natural it would seem—the mountains were alive. Now, though, I look at caves like a gynecologist searching for illness—I only pay attention to what I have to.
I’d been in a cave like this in Shanxi. We call them “Pits of Heaven,” because they seem to appear out of nowhere as if some god had smashed them into the earth. Pits of Heaven are often terribly deep. This one, though, was significantly more complex than the others I’d been in. Something about it felt different. Part of it had to be that this was a complex cave, one with both limestone and tectonic features. Caves like this are forme
d by tectonic activity and water erosion occurring simultaneously. They are dotted with thousands of watery trenches and ravines, crisscrossed by jagged rocks of grotesque shape. They have extremely complicated tunnel systems. Normal watery limestone caves tend to be relatively easy to explore. You can navigate the length of their underground rivers by oxskin raft, rarely encountering more than a few obstacles. The dark rivers of tectonic caves, however, often conceal extremely irregular faults. You could be floating along, smoking a cigarette, and suddenly come upon a three-hundred-foot waterfall crashing into the blackness. Run into one of those and you’re dead for sure. We try not to go too deep in tectonic caves.
This time there was no escaping it. I turned to tell some corpsmen they’d better tie some rocks to the raft anchors to weigh them down, but Chen Luohu was already instructing them. I jumped down into the water. It didn’t reach my knees, but the cold struck at my heart and seeped into my bones. I took in my surroundings: the walls were all limestone. Seeing Wang Sichuan, I walked up behind him. He was concentrating intently on one of the cliff walls. He noticed me as I walked over and motioned for me to take a look at something. I shined my flashlight on a portion of rock. The wall seemed polished, as if it were covered in a layer of wax. He then used his flashlight to point out several other spots that all bore similar markings. I stared at it for a moment, then glanced up at him, that “Now what do you think that means?” look in my eye.
“What you’re looking at is glazing,” he said quietly. “Meaning that, at some point, there was most likely a violent explosion somewhere in this cave.”