It was past midnight that day, around one o'clock.
The moon is dark and the wind is high.
On the earth bag of the reservoir, two black figures squatted on the ground, talking furtively in a low voice.
"Did you understand the process clearly?"
"I'm starting to dig. Just keep an eye on the surroundings and call the intercom if anything happens."
"No problem." Ye Zi nodded.
I continued to whisper: "When I dig to a depth of 1.5 meters, I will throw a stone out. When you hear the sound of the stone, come over and lift the soil."
She nodded again and said yes.
I checked the walkie-talkie in my trouser pocket. It took a lot of effort to buy this thing. She traveled dozens of miles to the town to buy it during the day.
Ye Zicat squatted in the corner with his waist bent.
In the darkness, her eyes scanned back and forth on the way up the mountain. This position was condescending and she could see everything around her clearly.
Get started!
In order to save time, I dug directly from the pit of Nai Li's grave without a cyclone shovel. I used an ordinary shovel brought by Ye Zi's family.
"Gu Gu, Gu Gu."
There was a cuckoo chirping halfway up the mountain.
Because most of the time when digging a hole, I have to kneel half-down and dig in, so I cut the shovel pole short so that it can be used more easily.
Let me tell you here that the tombs we built in the Tang and Song Dynasties, as long as they are not imperial tombs, are not buried very deep. Many of them are about five to meters underground. Unlike the Western Zhou and Warring States Period, which were often more than ten meters or even more than 20 meters underground.
Among the jobs I had done before, the Warring States Period Tomb of the Sulfuric Acid Factory was the deepest, almost thirty meters. If Jiang Yuan hadn't taken me there, I would never have been able to find it at that depth.
There are two ways to dig Tang and Song Dynasty tombs, the fast and the slow. The fast method is to use a Luoyang shovel to dig the pit, and then send the expanding explosive down and light it. After the explosion, the soil on the top of the tomb will squeeze the pit centripetally, and a natural formation will be formed.
The robbery hole is about half a meter in diameter. This method tests the amount of expanding explosives, and it is all done by veterans like Master Ji.
The slow one is to use the ordinary method to dig. I didn't get any expanding explosives, so I used the second method.
Fortunately, there were no rocks and the soil was piled to one side. I was quite skilled at earthwork, so I dug a hole about one meter in diameter very quickly.
I jumped down and continued to dig the soil. When I saw that it was almost done, I picked up a stone and threw it into the pit.
Ye Zi ran over immediately when she heard the noise. She tied two buckets with ropes and slowly lowered them down the robbery hole.
hot.
Especially at night in the dog days of July, it was even hotter here in the reservoir. After working for a while, I was sweating profusely and my hair was covered with dirt.
Armed with a headlamp and a bucket full of dirt, I shook the rope and whispered, "Pull up, faster."
The bucket filled with soil rubbed against the wall and slowly rose up.
The weight is not light, and Ye Zi's expression seems a little difficult. If Brother Yu did this, he could pull it up with one hand.
"Hurry up! Unload it after it's fallen!" My head was full of dirt and I urged her to hurry up.
Making a vertical hole is not a slope hole. You have to lift the soil upwards. If the soil is not scattered, I will bury myself in it by digging.
Digging, loading and unloading soil.
The speed can't be said to be fast, but it's definitely not slow. This is the result of my constant urging. Ye Zi said that her hands were sore and her arms hurt and she wanted to rest for two minutes, so I scolded her directly. After scolding her twice, she became honest.
(Actually, what I did at that time was inappropriate. If I were 25 years old or later, I would not let Ye Zi go up there alone, because if she threw two stones down, she could kill me.)
When the thieves dug the hole to a depth of about five meters.
The shovel hit the brick with a "clink" sound, and there were green bricks exposed under the feet.
They are hollow blue bricks from ancient times. These bricks are much larger than the bricks used to build houses in modern times. One brick can hold up to three bricks.
Strange....
We have dug up to the vault of the brick chamber tomb, but we haven't even seen a layer of rammed earth...
It's a bit abnormal, but when you think about it, in ancient times, ramming earth also cost money. At the end of the tomb construction, the owner found that the budget was not enough, so he saved some decoration. This situation is not impossible, but it also happens.
After clearing away the loess, a row of hollow old bricks was exposed under my feet. I rushed up and shouted: "Throw down the long crowbar."
Before I came, I brought two iron crowbars, one long and one short.
"knew."
"Just give in, I won't hit you on the head."
I said throw it away.
The pointed crowbar was thrown down, I picked it up and pried it hard at the cracks in the bricks.
It's very laborious without tools. This kind of broken brick vault can be broken open with just a few clicks of an ordinary diamond needle, not to mention a cannon needle.
It took a lot of effort for me to use the crowbar. Finally, I pressed my whole body on it and was able to pry up an old brick.
This kind of ancient vault with three straight and one horizontal, also called three straight and one ding, is easy to fix as long as one brick is tilted up.
The broken bricks fell down, revealing a dark hole.
I put on my headlamp and looked down.
At the bottom is a tomb chamber with a brick structure. There is no tomb passage. Because there is a layer of rammed earth missing on the vault, the heavy rain that fell in the past two days flowed into the tomb chamber along the gaps in the vault.
When I shined a light on it, I saw that there was water and mud underneath, which could probably reach up to a person's calf.
Visually, the height was about two meters. I jumped straight down, splashing mud on my pants.
this....
What the hell is this place... Why are there so many latrines?
There are more than a dozen circular pits on the floor of the tomb, with an interval of about one meter between each round pit.
Some pits have completely collapsed, while others have not yet collapsed. They look very much like toilet pits.
I squatted down and took a look with my flashlight. I saw that these round pits were two to three meters deep. There was water at the bottom of the pits. I could vaguely see some pieces of rotten cloth soaked in the muddy water.
Also, at the edge of these circular pits, there is a blue brick buried. When you wipe the dust with your hand, two words are engraved on the green brick.
"Zeyuan".
Head full of questions.
Zeyuan? I know there is a hotel in Beijing called Fengzeyuan, but that’s definitely not the case.
What kind of tomb structure is this?
With so many pits, could it be an ancient public toilet?
Behind me is an arch made of bricks, because I came down from the "top" and did not take the door.
I stood up and raised my flashlight to look at the brick carvings with simple patterns on the surrounding walls. Judging from the style, they were from the Northern Song Dynasty. The brick carving figures in the tombs of the Northern Song Dynasty, both men and women, all had oval faces, because these were not carved with knives.
Printed with a mold.
At that time, there were small private workshops specializing in making this kind of tomb bricks, and they could choose any pattern.
The tomb brick carvings of the Song Dynasty are not valuable and no one wants them, and their value is far less than that of the Northern Qi and Northern Wei Dynasties. This is mostly because of this. In the Northern Qi and Northern Wei Dynasties, they were all carved by hand.
I don't know what the dozens of round pits in the tomb are for. I was about to take a closer look when suddenly, the red light on the walkie-talkie in my hip pocket came on, and there was a roaring sound of electricity, which startled me.
"What's wrong?" I shouted up to him.
After waiting for a few seconds, Ye Zi was lying at the entrance of the robbery cave. She lowered her voice and said urgently: "It's over, it's over! Xiang Feng, I saw someone coming! What should I do, what should I do!"
I nervously asked: "How far is it?"
Ye Zi said it was a few hundred meters away and used a flashlight.
It was past 3 o'clock in the morning, and everyone in the village was asleep. Anyone who had nothing to do would go out for a walk in the middle of the night. I told Ye Zi, don't panic, just wait and see, maybe they are just passing by.
I turned off the flashlight and felt that time was passing by minute by minute.
Immediately, Ye Zi shouted again: "It's over Xiang Feng! Come up quickly!"
"I saw it! It's Wang Yonghong!"
I don't even know who Wang Yonghong is, but Ye Zi knows him, he must be a villager.
"Still stunned! Throw the rope down quickly!"
I used my hands and feet to grab the rope and climb up quickly!
After climbing up as fast as possible, I saw that there was another grave bag piled up beside Li Nai's grave pit, because there was no time to backfill it with the excavated soil.
The flashlight light was getting closer and closer, Ye Zi was frightened, she pulled me and ran down the slope.
There is only one way down from the reservoir, and there is no place to hide. If you run up the mountain regardless of anything, as long as that person comes over, there is a 100% chance that the thief will be seen!
In desperation.
Ye Zi suddenly pushed me, she threw me down, and then sat directly on my waist.
