The shaking lasted for more than ten minutes before the surrounding area became completely quiet.
After the panic, Logombu looked at his brother thoughtfully, something flashed in his eyes, and he immediately calmed down his emotions and lit the fire again to keep warm.
The oxygen in the cave was still sufficient. Several people used the tools they carried to move the snow accumulated at the entrance of the cave little by little into the gap at the back of the cave, and worked together to dig out the entrance of the cave blocked by the snow.
It was late at night, it was dark and gray outside, there was no moon, and no matter how many stars there were, they could not illuminate the vast earth.
When they went out to take a look on the second day, they discovered that the side of the snow-capped peak where they were originally seemed to be like a sharp sword falling from the sky, flattening the snow layer. The snow covering the surface of the mountain had disappeared yesterday.
Large areas of the night fell into the canyon further down.
What shocked them even more was that there were many freeze-dried corpses hanging around the cave.
These are the people who died here in an accident after entering the snowfield with Dong Can. Hanging on the edge of the cave entrance was a mutilated corpse that was strangled by a rope and fell to death on the mountain wall. His head had been filled with the snowy mountains.
Some kind of falcon on the ground ate up all the food.
The corpse's face was so damaged that it was impossible to tell what it looked like before birth. There must be more corpses buried deep in the snow in the canyon below.
After the initial surprise, the three porters were ecstatic and hurriedly reached out to touch the corpse's pockets, trying to find something valuable.
Encountering corpses in the snowy mountains is sometimes not a bad thing. First, the corpse may carry a lot of things, which you can keep in your pocket and take out in exchange for money.
Second, if you can know the identity of the corpse and take it out as a personal token, you can get some information fees from the family members.
When they came out of the cave in the morning, the wind and snow had basically stopped.
However, no valuable clues were found from the surrounding corpses. Judging from the exposed bones, the bones and joints of these people were relatively worn, especially the leg bones and shoulders. It seemed that they were used to doing it before they were born.
A coolie.
The locals were familiar with how to climb the snow-capped mountains in a safer way. Under the leadership of Luo Gombu, the group climbed down the steep cliff and stopped almost at the bottom of the canyon.
There are more corpses here than before, and some corpses were hard-frozen and stacked in the ice. Judging from their clothes, they are not the same group of people who were hung on the cliff and fell to death.
There were no major external injuries on these people, but the old Tibetan Lhapa knew how these people died when he saw the posture of the corpses.
The backs of all the corpses were pressed tightly against the cliff, just like their current actions.
These people must have been trapped by a heavy snowstorm when they came here not long ago. They wanted to take a rest before going up. As a result, the temperature dropped sharply. Many people had no time to react. They were frozen by the extreme cold of the snowfield when they fell into a coma due to physical and mental exhaustion.
Died here.
Most of the corpses here have foreign faces.
Laba said to the younger brother: "My boss, these people should have come out of the mountains and rested here, but they froze to death."
There are too many corpses here, and there must be more in the snow-covered areas below. The corpses are buried in the snow, and they will never be discovered due to the changes in the world.
"Come out?" The little brother asked doubtfully, "Is anyone active in the snowy mountains?"
"It's not what my boss thought." Laba explained, "I am not familiar with the faces of these people. They are not from Medog. As early as the past 20 or 30 years, foreigners often entered the mountains.
I don’t know their purpose, but it must be related to this no-man’s land.”
The little brother nodded and looked far away in the direction where the corpses came from, with no unnecessary emotion on his face.
Raba and the others still searched for the dead people's belongings as usual, especially foreigners' packages, which contained many valuable and good things.
At this time, Logombu on one side noticed a larger black shadow in the distance, and pointed to the other two people.
He put his hand on his forehead to block the dazzling snowy light and looked over, and found that it was three foreigners hugging each other before they died. There were also several people who came close to hug each other for warmth. Their arms seemed to be protective.
Wearing something.
The three of Laba looked at each other, and when they saw that the younger brother just glanced at it casually and didn't care, the three of them crawled over, used knives to pry open a crack in the frozen corpse, and stuffed it through the opening with a fire stick.
I saw that there was indeed something wrapped in cloth hidden inside.
Raba thought to himself that something that these people go to such great lengths to protect must be very precious.
In order to make the gap bigger so that they could take things out, Laba and the others tried their best to break off several arms that were tangled together and frozen together, and then they took out the package from the enlarged gap.
Come out.
These people are not the faces that appeared in Medog, nor are they the snowy mountains starting from Medog. Laba and the others can sell off the things taken from them with peace of mind, without having to worry about being sold by temples that have good relations with these foreigners.
Discover.
At noon that day, Laba led everyone to a snow slope and dug a hole in the snow to block the wind and rest.
The little brother still had the same indifferent expression. He just ate dry food that was slightly heated on the fire. He rarely spoke along the way.
Raba and the others are still a little curious about this lonely and generous owner, but that's all. The most important thing right now is to divide the spoils.
They put all the valuable items they took out from the dead people together, divided them among themselves, and finally opened the tight package.
After the outermost layer of black cloth was removed, the inner and outer three layers were still wrapped with some velvet cloth. Unwrap the three layers in a row. The bottom gold cloth was wrapped with something like an iron box. There was also something like an iron box under the box.
A thick black notebook.
They opened the box and found some fossil-like specimens inside, as well as two fist-sized gold balls.
The golden ball was placed alone in the iron box, looking more precious than the other instruments in the box.
There is also a small emerald-green box inside the iron box. It is very delicate and looks like a large piece of emerald gemstone.
The third porter accompanying him was Raba's distant nephew. The young man couldn't control his temper and reached out to open the small box, wanting to see what was inside.
Unexpectedly, as soon as the lid was moved, a whooshing sound was heard.
Before Laba and the others could react, the young man's face turned purple and he fell to the ground with vomiting blood and painful sounds in his throat. He was still holding the emerald box tightly in his hands.
The two of them subconsciously stepped back in fear. The blood spit out by the young man gradually turned black. After a while, Laba reacted and touched his nephew's face, trying to breathe. However, as soon as he stretched out his hand, someone stopped him halfway.
Stop.
"Don't touch it, it's poisonous." The boy said seriously.
Laba tensed his face, stared at his nephew who fell on the ground, his body starting to get colder, and sighed. He had not been with this nephew for a short time, and he did not feel too much sadness.
They have been walking in the snowy mountains all year round to make a living, and have long been accustomed to the sudden death of their companions. Today it is someone else who dies, and tomorrow it will be you and me. Accidents happen all the time, and death is an extremely common thing. The little brother stared closely at a tiny hole between the eyebrows of Laba's nephew's corpse, then carefully opened his fingers and took out the box.
The little brother touched the lid of the box with his finger, and the small hole through which the fine needle had been ejected had now closed automatically.
He said slowly: "This is a machine box, and there are still a lot of poisonous needles in it."
The death of Raba's nephew did not open the death box.
Logombo suggested with some fear, "How about we just throw the box away? Anyway, we have gained enough."
The little brother shook his head, held the lid of the box with his right hand, and rubbed the gaps carefully with his fingertips.
The two of them hurriedly hid far away, fearing that the box would pop open and poison them too.
But I saw the little brother holding the lid of the box with one hand and slowly twisting it to the right. There was a series of gear grinding sounds in the box. After two turns, he gently lifted the lid.
Seeing that no poisonous needle was ejected this time, Luo Gongbu was curious and came over to take a look. He suddenly took a breath and exclaimed: "My dear mother, please close the door quickly, this thing is too dangerous."<
/p>
There are countless densely packed silk threads under the box lid, and half of the thin needles originally stretched on the silk threads have shrunk to the edge of the box.
The little brother ignored his words, put two fingers in, avoiding the silk threads, clamped the knob at the bottom and turned it gently, and the remaining half of the needle retracted along with the silk threads.
The two of them stared at the little brother's hand, dumbfounded, and they were so surprised that they didn't know what to do.
The little brother took out a black stone from the box, with a diameter the size of a bottle cap. The surface was bumpy, very irregular, and very ugly, as if there were many small twisted faces crowded together.
"What is this?" Luo Gombo asked doubtfully.
The little brother shook his head and looked a little confused. He had never seen such a thing before.
There was nothing fishy about the black lump. Luo Gongbu turned around and picked up the black notebook on the side and looked at it. This thing seemed to be equally worthless. It was full of tadpole writings by foreigners.
He couldn't understand, so he flipped through it and put it aside, and divided the two golden balls equally with Raba.
The little brother picked up the notebook he had put aside. The text recorded on it was in German. In other words, these foreigners who froze to death in the canyon were most likely from Germany.
Raba was immersed in ecstasy and felt that this was the luckiest day in his life. While he was overjoyed, he was thinking about how to explain his reasons for retreating to the employer who hired him.
Now that he has a golden ball, he may be richer than his boss, and there is no need to continue venturing deeper into the snow-capped mountains.
But this was always a bit unkind. When he was hesitating, he saw the younger brother holding the notebook in front of him, pointing at a string of awkward words written on it, and asking him what it meant.
It turned out that there was a very complicated pattern drawn on a page in the middle of the notebook, with many strange patterns on it, and a crooked Tibetan comment on the side.
This string of Tibetan language is an old and rare script here in Medog, called Ga Lai dialect. It sounds very similar to Monba language, but it is actually very different.
There are no more than 3,000 people in the world who can speak Ga Lai, and it happened that a chance encounter in the past allowed Raba to learn a few words of this language.
He stared at the line of words and translated it half-guessingly, "The edge of the sky and the earth seems to be the limit of the world."
﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉
The previous Deren recorded these contents in great detail. Some of the things that the younger brother only mentioned briefly, he also added in small characters based on his own guesses and previous records. It was very detailed, but some of the contents were inevitably lingering.
A little more.
Zhang Shuxun didn't want to miss any information, so he could only read it word by word with patience.
The black notebook that the little brother got from the Germans is also in the box. Deren seems to have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and he also wrapped a layer of square oil paper on the outside and preserved it very carefully.
Zhang Zhuxun opened his notebook and read as fast as he could.
The contents recorded in the previous German part can be traced back to before the 20th century. During the period when Laojiumen was prosperous, these Germans had already begun to investigate and analyze them.
The origin of the matter is that one day, their supreme leader received a piece of sky stone from the inland, which was sent by a middle-aged man with an Asian face. The sky stone was carved with patterns that mortals could not describe, and it was exquisite.
It's like a door leading to the endless divine realm, very mysterious.
As soon as he saw the sky stone, the German leader was deeply attracted, and then invited the middle-aged man to have a secret conversation with him.
No one knows the specific content of the secret conversation, but after coming out of the secret room, the leader began to arrange for his subordinates to investigate.
They found a lot of things, but they were very scattered. Following the middle-aged man's reminder, they set out to investigate all the rumors about the snowy mountains near the Himalayan border. After spending decades, they only found some rough things. Until the appearance of Dong Can and his party brought hope to the German leaders. Around 1942, the Germans discovered the survivors of the cavalry team in some places, but two of them were fools and were beaten to death by losers out of anger because of gambling.
They tortured the only remaining man, and finally found more than a dozen golden balls buried in the ground in his manor.
The man told what they had encountered in the snow-capped mountains, and pointed out that surrounded by golden balls, there was a huge black sky stone with countless patterns on it, which looked like the German rubbings.
The patterns on the drawings are 50-60% similar.
At that time, the German leader was already old. When a person is about to die, some bad qualities will inevitably be revealed.
His sons were dissatisfied that their old father was still holding on to such a huge business despite his old age, so they simply beat the old man to death without stopping.
Several sons of the leader fought with each other, and they were all defeated. In the end, the ruined business was taken over by an American businessman.
It is worth mentioning that the name of this American businessman is Cox Hendry.