Chapter 139 Exploring an ancient tomb in broad daylight
"Come on, Brother Yu, let's put these on."
I opened the trunk and took out two cotton coats, throwing one over casually.
Brother Yu asked what he was doing wearing this?
I buttoned up my coat and said, "We can't let anyone tell that we are from out of town. We will go to the village later and then to the nearby mountains." ??
After dressing up in disguise, we pretended to be locals and entered the village.
Around noon, many old people were sitting in the village basking in the sun, and some women were sitting in front of their homes with bowls of rice in their hands, eating and chatting. The villagers did not react much to the arrival of our two new faces.
Soon, I saw three children with dirty faces lying on the ground playing with glass balls in the alley. After watching for a while, I couldn't help but pick up the glass balls and hit them.
One hit.
I picked up two more glass balls and hit them twice, hitting three out of three times.
"You are so awesome! You are so accurate!"
A child said with admiration in his eyes.
I laughed and said, "Where are you now? I have scored 100 hits in a century, and I was said to be unrivaled in the three northeastern provinces."
Seeing that I was playing well, Brother Yu was still childlike. He picked it up and flicked it. The glass ball he popped out was like a cannonball, and it fell apart the moment it hit another one! There was just a crisp sound!
I told him not to fight like this, but to use less force.
Brother Yu refused to accept it, so he hit it a few more times, and all the remaining ones were broken into pieces.
The child burst into tears immediately, crying and saying, "Please compensate me for the marbles!"
I said don't cry, brother go buy some for you.
When I was a child, the marbles I played with cost five cents, but now I can only buy seven for one dollar. Prices have skyrocketed.
I remember that when I was in fifth grade, my classmates started to play cards and bet on marbles. If they didn’t have any in their hands, they would yell out the amount and owe it first. This resulted in me owing more than 6,000 marbles at that time. Those kids said they didn’t want the marbles anymore.
, convert it into money for me, and let me pay thirty yuan.
I was so scared that I hid at home every day and dared not go out. I even wanted to kneel down to them. Since then, I have deeply understood the dangers of gambling.
The owner of the canteen in the village is a hunchbacked old woman. After I gave the money, she said to me, "Young man, I think you are very smart. Where did you come from?"
"
Auntie, I came here from Living Water Village to visit relatives, my father’s name is Zhang Pingshun, you hugged me when you were a child, have you forgotten?”
"I hugged you? I don't remember."
"That was all a long time ago. It's been about twenty years since our family moved out." I said.
"Oh, I see, why do you look familiar to me?"
"By the way, aunt, I remember seeing a stone horse on the mountain behind our village when I was a child. I could also pick up some pottery fragments and the like nearby. Why didn't I see it this time?"
"Are you remembering it wrong? There has never been a stone horse on the mountain in our village, but there is a temple on the mountain, and there is a stone master buried in the bamboo forest behind the temple."
"Yes, auntie, I remembered it wrong! It's either Shi Ma or Mr. Shi! I remember there was one. Auntie is gone and I'll see you in two days."
After coming out of the canteen, Brother Yu and I carried our bags and walked up the mountain to find the small temple.
Brother Yu asked me how I knew there were stone sculptures on the mountain? After all, it was my first time here today.
"Look, hear, ask and understand", this is the way of "asking" in the industry.
From the moment I entered the village, I seemed to be careless. In fact, I looked at the architectural styles of all the old houses around me, including the stone pavement under my feet and some bricks piled in the corners of the road.
Half of the bricks caught my attention. It was a blue brick from the Southern Song Dynasty.
It is difficult to date bricks, but you can recognize them if you see them many times. The bricks of each dynasty are different.
Bricks before the Sui Dynasty were black in color, with relatively regular corners, and traces of cords on one side. This was because the bricks were burned with something on one side to avoid burning them.
In the Tang Dynasty, the thickness of the bricks began to become thinner, the corners were not straight and slightly curved, and there were stripes on both sides, some deep and some shallow.
By the Song Dynasty, there were fewer corded bricks and striped bricks, and they were replaced by a kind of "impression brick". The impression brick was wide in width, short in length, brown in color, and had geometric patterns.
Bricks from the Liao and Jin Dynasties are best recognized because they have a stripe on them
Each groove is about as thick as a chopstick.
Soon Brother Yu and I found a small temple in the mountains. It was abandoned, but there was still a clay statue in the temple. The clay statue's entire face was painted with red paint, holding a wooden stick, raising eyebrows and staring, and wearing a tattered yellow robe.
"What god is this offered to?" Brother Yu asked.
I said, "This should be a local god in Chun'an, called Mr. Lu Shenqi. According to legend, he used to be a warrior with strong martial arts skills. Later, he was killed in a fight with bandits. All the merchants who used to go to Chun'an worshiped him.
I hope you have a safe journey."
When I arrived at the bamboo forest behind the temple, I quickly discovered a stone figure buried in the soil, with only half of its head exposed on the surface.
It can be seen that the surface of the stone is weathered and has experienced many vicissitudes of life. It is not visible below the forehead, and there are overgrown weeds around it.
I kicked the stone man's head and said, "This is a stone statue from the middle and late Southern Song Dynasty. If I guess correctly, he should be in this posture underneath."
I put my left hand on my right hand and placed it horizontally in front of my chest, learning a posture.
"It's strange why there is only one stone statue? There should be something else." ??
"Has it been damaged or stolen?" Brother Yu said.
"That's what I'm afraid of. If the stone statue is so obvious, I'm afraid it will be an empty pot long ago."
I looked carefully around the bamboo forest and found no robber holes, but I had a vague feeling that my colleagues might have climbed there first and the robber holes had been backfilled.
Brother Yu said, "Not necessarily. Let's try a few shovels first to determine if there is an ancient tomb."
"Brother Yu, there's no need to search. It's 100% there. It's about five to six deep. It's probably a two-chamber tomb, possibly a couple's tomb. The owner of the tomb is a military general in the middle and late Southern Song Dynasty, probably in the third or fourth grade."
I looked at the sky and had an idea and said, "Do you think we dare to dig now?"
"How can that be done! It's broad daylight! What if someone from the village comes over?"
"No, I think it's okay. Look, this place is backed by a mountain, there are no fields around, and there's a bamboo forest blocking the front. Who would come here when they're full and have nothing to do?"
"Brother Yu, please let me go. I'll do it alone. If we call everyone over and find out it's an empty pot, it won't be a waste of our time."
?”
After discussing it for a few minutes, we decided to do it.
After assembling the shovel, I went around the stone statue and drew a big circle on the ground with a stick. Then I walked to the middle of the circle and started walking backwards facing the stone statue.
I counted the steps in my mind, and when I reached the seventeenth step, I stopped and dug down from here.
Brother Yu was letting off steam not far away. I originally estimated the hole to be six meters deep, but when the hole was dug to a depth of five meters, there was still no obvious change in the soil layer.
I thought about it and instead of continuing downward, I curled up in the hole and dug to the left.
This time I made a discovery and saw "flower soil"!
Due to the nervousness, I sweated a lot, and the dirt and sand mixed with sweat stuck to my body, which was very uncomfortable.
Not long after, the shovel hit a white hard object. The surface of this object was covered with white mud. I knew that this was not white plaster mud. It was Sanhe soil that had been soaked in water for many years and softened into this thick sticky mud.
After clearing the soil for a long time, I saw a large brick coffin with a stone roof that was probably over five meters long exposed.
The first time I saw this thing, I was extremely surprised, and my heart was beating fast! Because, I originally thought it was an ordinary brick family burial tomb.
This brick coffin is complete and seems to have never been stolen. I have never seen such a thing with my own eyes, so I don’t know what it looks like.
It was like this back then.
First build a regular rectangle with green bricks, then put the wooden coffin into the brick coffin, lay a layer of bricks inside to seal the wooden coffin, and then pour Sanhe soil and sticky glutinous rice juice into the brick coffin.
In the gap between the coffin and the wooden coffin, a giant stone bar weighing a thousand kilograms was finally covered on the top.
In this case, it is very difficult to open it from directly above because the thickness of the stone slab is close to forty centimeters.
I knocked on the outermost brick coffin several times with a shovel. Not even a white spot was left on it, it was extremely hard.
After I came up, I asked Brother Yu to watch here. I went back to the car and found a hacksaw. Then I ran back to the village canteen and bought five bottles of vinegar and a wok. The old lady asked me why I bought so much vinegar at once.
At about four o'clock in the afternoon, I lit a fire and heated the vinegar until it boiled, then poured it into several water glasses, then took a hacksaw and a crutch needle and went into the robbery hole.