desert abyss

A week later, several military jeeps drove into the base and dropped off some armed police, two of whom joined our team.That's how the expedition team arrived.The two armed policemen respected Huang Kun very much, and it could be heard between the lines that he was not a conscript or a non-commissioned officer, but a police officer.This surprised me, because it is impossible for armed police officers and soldiers to do what the underworld would do. However, my impression of Huang Kun at that time was the underworld, similar to the mafia in "The Godfather".They didn't like to see Li Zhen very much, probably because Li Zhen was very casual and had long hair, which made him a bit ruffian.

We came to Xinjiang in a jeep, and the convoy of supplies followed.Seeing that the day of "going to the ground" is coming, the team members who are going to enter the desert are actively preparing, and the staff in charge of logistics are also very busy.Many of us have been in the desert, but it is the first time for most of us to enter the Taklamakan, especially those foreigners, who are very excited.

The Taklamakan Desert is located in the center of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang.Taklimakan means "the desert under the mountains", and Tarim means "the place where you can't get out if you go in".In addition to the dense Populus euphratica forest growing along the river around the desert, forming a "green island in the sand sea" and a "green corridor", the desert is extremely dry. In the center, the temperature of the sand can sometimes be as high as 70 degrees. It will be greatly distorted, and it will produce mirages even if it is not overheated.

I'm curious how Li Zhen and Huang Kun came out of such an environment.

It now appears that this question is not nutritious.Apparently, they were able to come out because someone knew they would, someone had been waiting there.

Of course, this is something.

At the edge of the desert, which was the area we were approaching at that time, there were abundant desert plants, but this abundance was basically underground.The underground root system of desert plants can reach 100 times that of above-ground plants.Li Zhen mentioned that these plants can be eaten, of course, it may also bring out scorpions, beetles, ants, etc., and "that would be better".

We're about to be the men and women and Lee Jin at the top of the food chain.This sentence was said by Xu Jin.

There are only three female comrades in our team, but to be precise, there are only two, because we don’t treat Xu Jin as a woman, but as a child.Liao Xiaodan is a strong woman, shrewd and capable, while Yenia's beauty can only be achieved by young Russian girls.In contrast, Xu Jin has been wearing a clean and shiny ponytail, with a harmless baby face, calling us "teacher" or "brother and sister".She is really young, so we all treated her like a child at first.As a result, she saw people's hearts not long after the day, and her deep knowledge and skills of making complaints were quickly exposed.

Even in the Taklamakan, Xu Jin remained extremely calm, and she could fall asleep in the back seat no matter how bumpy the jeep was.However, at the right time, she will open her eyes and complain, making people think that she is just pretending to sleep.

I have excerpted a few conversations between the few of us in the journal.In the future, we can actually see a lot of signs from these conversations, but at the time I just thought it was funny, and the logistics team sent us too many notebooks. I have nothing to write about as a translator.

Me: Li Zhen!When I went to take a shower just now, a few clean black insects washed out of the water!how to explain!

Xu Jin: Brother, if you are afraid of bathing alone, you can ask Li Zhen to accompany you. Unity is strength.

Me: Junior, you are so uncute.

Li Zhen: Wait a minute, did you just call him brother?Why didn't I know you still had this relationship?

Me: You don’t understand this. Back then I was very good at SISU.

Li Zhen: Ah, I dare to say that you are the legendary second senior brother!It's a pleasure to meet you, how is the daughter-in-law of Mr. Gao's family recently?

Me: Why am I the second senior brother?

Xu Jin: (She was sleeping all the time just now) You don't understand.Actually, Li Zhen, you are the real second senior brother, right?He is always a little bit worse than Huang Kun in all aspects, so he is the veritable second senior brother in your trio.The second child of ten thousand years.

Yenia: Yang An, what does the second child mean?

Me: It's kind of hard to explain.

Li Zhen: Girl, your mouth is too poisonous, how can I be worse than Huang Kun?

Xu Jin: The second child of ten thousand years~ The second child of ten thousand years~ The second child of ten thousand years~

Me: All right.

Li Zhen: What's good!Girl, I want to discuss this matter with you!

Xu Jin: ... (she fell asleep again)

If she wasn't pretending to be asleep, then Xu Jin's dream and her waking hours were almost exactly halfway through.It also occurred to me at the time that she might be living some kind of parallel life in the dream.

I never thought that this brain hole could be so close to the real situation.This can be counted as one of the few insights in my life.

From then on, I realized that apart from Huang Kun and me, the only one who could make Li Zhen speechless was this girl who was sometimes eccentric and sometimes calm.In fact, if fate is not too ruthless, there may be many stories between them, but unfortunately life is always like this, sometimes it is too intense to imagine, and sometimes it is too empty.From the beginning to the end, there were only some pale words between Li Zhen and Xu Jin, and then many accidents happened, which led to them almost never seeing each other again.Their past and future are obviously closely intertwined, but I, the one in the middle, have experienced a lot with them separately. I know the close connection between them, but I can only watch them separated by fate from beginning to end.

The most beautiful thing in Taklimakan is of course the famous red and white holy mountain, but we are not going to travel, this road is not our turn.The three teams separated after going south from the Tianshan Mountains, and made an appointment to gather near Lop Nur if they could advance.Our team took the road on the right, that is, closer to the east of Lop Nur. It is said that the magnetic field reaction here is relatively strong; Huang Kun's team walked in the middle, trying to trace back the expedition team that was almost wiped out back then. and the third German team took a left-to-west position, leaning toward the Pamirs, and I still haven't seen their leader.

Korla at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains is full of business, and people who are not familiar with it often lament that such a highly developed city can be found on the edge of the desert.In Korla we stayed in a civilized area for the last time.A few days before I entered the desert, I was closely watched by Huang Kun and Li Zhen. They were as weird as black and white, and they stayed around me for a moment, preventing me from talking to anyone. I wanted to ask the big girl in the restaurant to add a bowl of noodles Will not work.I was very angry and tried to argue with them for half the night that there is no such thing as "don't eat noodles" in the lunar calendar.Later, Li Zhen was called by some beautiful female travelers to help them change the tires, and Huang Kun sent me back to the hotel room.

The lights in the hallway were covered in dark spots, whether it was aging rust or dead bugs, they flickered on and off, and then they simply went off when we walked by, which surprised me.

There are stairs in the north and south of the hotel. The stairs in the north are used for fire evacuation. As a result, they are full of sundries and are usually not opened. You can only see the black iron handrails and concrete steps inside through the window glass on the corridor door.When I passed the corridor door, I suddenly caught a glimpse of a person lying on the other side of the window glass, looking here.

It was pitch black at the time, and the man's face was pale and his eyes were round, which gave me a strong visual impact.I stopped in my tracks.Huang Kun also stopped behind me.I turned around and opened my mouth to scream, but didn't dare.

"What's wrong?" Huang Kun asked me.

"I suddenly remembered that I left a pack of tissues in the dining hall downstairs." I tried to pretend to be calm, but Huang Kun had already noticed my abnormality, or he had actually noticed the person behind the glass window.

"Oh, then I'll help you take a look, you go back to your room first." He smiled at me, "Don't turn your head, just go."

I took a breath, turned around and walked forward. After taking two steps, I had a strong urge to look back.I didn't understand Huang Kun's words at all, so I turned my head to look, only to find that the corridor was empty and Huang Kun had disappeared.

A gust of cold wind in early autumn blew by, I shivered, and hurried back to my room.I felt twisted left and right, and always had the illusion that someone was following me. It wasn't until I sat in front of the mirror on the table and looked at the empty room behind me that I felt more comfortable.

Just when I was thinking this way, suddenly the lights in my room went out.

I was so frightened that I almost shed two layers of skin. While cursing the infrastructure of the so-called four-star hotel, I hurriedly fumbled for the matches prepared by the hotel in the drawer, and struck a small flame three times.

I sat in front of the mirror, the fire was flickering, illuminating only myself, everything behind me was hidden in darkness.I stared at my own face, remembering the one I had just seen behind the glass door.The man's eyes were so wide and his face was so pale, he fit the image of a perverted murderer in horror movies.

After thinking about it, I suddenly found a problem.I'm 181cm tall, so I don't think I'm short, but the small window on the door is much higher than my head, probably two meters above the ground.In this way, the person lying by the window is at least [-] meters tall.Such a height is a bit special.If such a person appears around us, it is impossible not to be noticed.

Then I realized that the man wasn't lying by the window.

He was hung behind the door with his face facing the window.

I don't know when it started, cold sweat dripped from my skin, and my heart beat faster.I stared at the flames on my hand in the mirror, hoping to draw some comfort from the fire.

Then I felt a sinking of my right shoulder and saw in the mirror a hand on my shoulder.

I jumped up and threw the match in that direction.This is no brainer, it is an emergency response that the body remembers after training.

Fortunately, there were no monsters in the room, and the thing behind me yelled.It turned out to be Li Zhen.Li Jinjae was smoking on the balcony, and when he saw me sitting in front of the mirror, pretending to be a ghost, he thought there was something wrong with me, but when he came over, he was burned by me.

I saw him almost weeping with joy, rushed up and hugged him and spoke a long series of words inarticulately.Li Zhen understood after listening to it several times.

"You turned back? Turned back?" He grabbed me and yelled.

"I don't know! I don't know!" I also grabbed him anxiously.

"Fuck! Huang Kun! Yang An, you! Fuck! Huang Kun!" Li Zhen was so angry that I was shaking him around.

(At that time, the scene where the two of us were so excited that we hugged each other in the room with snot and tears in our eyes, now thinking about it, it is extremely funny and extremely sad.)

Fortunately, Li Zhen's cell phone rang at this time, and we all felt a little embarrassed when we came back to our senses.Li Zhen picked up the phone and answered twice.

"You're right. Someone in the team was hanged in the fire escape. Liao Xiaodan told everyone to gather. Our itinerary has changed. We will spend the night in the desert tonight." He closed his flip phone and said to me, " Get your bags ready, they're going to search."

"Search? What's going on?"

"We expected that something might happen before departure, so we have been heavily guarded for the past two days and strictly monitored all outsiders. There are ghosts in the team."

However, subsequent searches yielded no results.The people set up tents in the desert.

After leaving the city and approaching the desert, everyone was shivering from the cold.I couldn't fall asleep at all because of the shock just now, and I heard someone singing Faye Wong loudly outside in the middle of the night.Since my roommate Li Zhen, who never slept with me, was still missing, I figured he was there.

In the early morning, I crawled out of my tent to relax, only to see Huang Kun sitting on a mound outside my tent, drinking from a small cup.I was about to praise him for being a young hero, but I saw a figure dancing on the other side of the mound, with his back to the gradually brightening East.

Li Zhen's dancing posture is very recognizable, I have seen Yang Liping dance many times on TV.

Peacock dance is mostly performed by men in the market. It is rigid and stretched, with obvious edges and corners, and the movements of arching and shaking shoulders are very powerful, which is different from women's dance postures.

"I didn't expect Li Zhen to be from the Dai nationality." I sat down beside Huang Kun and joked.

"Dancing the peacock dance in the early morning or evening light can ward off evil spirits. It's a pity that there is no drum, otherwise I can help him beat the beat. That is the real peacock dance." Huang Kun didn't answer my words.

"To ward off evil spirits? Peacock dance can also ward off evil spirits?" In my impression, the only dance that can ward off evil spirits is to dance around the fire wearing a mask and a grass skirt.

"It's one thing that peacock dance is beautiful and has national characteristics, but it's another thing that peacock dance can ward off evil spirits." Huang Kun dangled his wine glass, looking at Li Zhen, "A thousand eyes on a peacock feather represent a thousand hands The thousand eyes on the thousand palms of Guanyin are a symbol of auspiciousness. Many peacock dances in the folk are adapted from Buddhist stories. In the most popular dance stories, the peacock blinds the devil with the brilliant light when shaking its feathers. Defeated the devil."

When he said that, I understood a little bit.Dance is inherently ceremonial, and peacocks are often regarded as a symbol of beauty and kindness. It is not surprising that peacock dance can ward off evil spirits.According to legend, Vishnu, one of the three-phase gods in Indian mythology, reincarnated as Heitian with all his divine power. When he came down to save the world, Heitian always wore peacock feathers and a golden crown on his head. , The custom of painting peacock feathers for blessings.

"However, why do you start dancing the big god for no reason," I said while watching, "Although Li Zhen has a thin waist, he is a bit too tall."

"He's seeing me off." Huang Kun picked up his wine glass and sprinkled a straight line on the ground, then raised his head and drank the rest of the wine, "It's going to be bad luck. He can't dance as well as his sister, but it's okay .Besides, in nature, only peacocks open their tails.”

"Li Zhen also has a sister?" I asked, "I've never heard you mention it."

"Ah, yes." Huang Kun put the cup on the sand, "We don't want her to step into our muddy water, and we hide many things from her."

"Li Zhen's older sister should be pretty." I squinted my eyes and fantasized, "But I prefer innocent girls, I don't think she's that type. Do you know her well?"

"It's okay." Huang Kun thought for a while, then knocked on my head, "Where did you go?"

"I just thought about it casually." I said doglegly.

Huang Kun looked at me and shook his head.

"Yang An, take care."