Book 1: Chapter 161
We reorganized the equipment and collected some other things from the rest of the group, such as climbing ropes, shlights, batteries, crank generators, and some dry food. I borrowed a machete and stuck it on the back of my belt. Kan Jian also had three long-range slingshots, so he picked up some pebbles and dipped them in mud to make them ball-shaped until he had about seven or eight hundred of them. He even had a slingshot that could shoot short arrows, so he made about thirty or forty arrows out of bamboo stalks. The arrowheads had all been heated in the fire and were very sharp.
Kan Jian, Liu Sang, and Baishe followed me. I roughly exined my n for the tulou to them so that the rest of the guys could execute it when they had the chance. The four of us set out for the fog-covered mountain.
The clouds were hanging very low. After spending a long time in Fujian, I knew that this meant it might rain again in a few days. The trees in the mountains were so huge that their branches were intertwined with each other. The mountains here werent very tall, but the trees were very dense. Even the gaps were covered in shrubs. When I first came here, I remembered that there was a sign that seemed to say this was a protected area.
Finding a specific tree in such arge forest was too difficult, but fortunately, royal poincianas were a different kind of tree. We climbed up the mountainside and used binocrs to search carefully in the valley below. The wet fog made me feel like I had returned to the past, but there was also a faint ache in my knees. My father had developed rheumatism after walking in the mountains for so many years, so I figured it was something I couldn''t avoid. At this time, I couldnt smoke and even had to cover my nose and mouth so that the air in the woods wouldnt hurt my lungs. It was exhausting.
We soon saw the crown of a huge royal poinciana.
Liu Sang seemed a little skeptical, "Don''t you find it strange? This kind of tree only entered China in the neenth century. Many of them are nted in the houses of Fujian maritime merchants in urban areas. How could this kind of tree exist out here in the wilderness?"
"It was specially nted by someone. Look at the canopy. Its been here at least a hundred years. Someone chose this ce in the mountains a hundred years ago and nted this tree. The flowers are red when they bloom, so its probably used to guide the way. I said quietly. "Just think. This tulou is like the Yong Longchang Building that was constructed using sand. It took them around twenty-five years to build it (1). The people who built this tulou and the people who nted the royal poinciana here are probably the same."
I had developed the habit of solving problems without asking what the purpose behind them was, so I didn''t carefully analyze the details. It was said that arge number of tulous had been built here since the Yuan and Song Dynasties. Did these circr tulous evolve from the custom of listening to thunder at that time? Did the tulou we were at just happen to be built over the calling spring, or was it deliberately covering it up? These were the big questions.
When we arrived in front of the huge royal poinciana at dusk, we were all covered in sweat. The sweat in our bodies couldn''t get out and the moisture in the air couldn''t dry it, so we were all very ufortable. I carefully looked around the royal poinciana, trying to find even the smallest mark on the bark, but I didn''t see anything. <em>Is this not the one?</em> I asked myself.
Kan Jian looked up at the canopy and I suddenly remembered that Poker-Face always slept in trees. I told Kan Jian to go up and take a look. He had just barely reached the canopy when he nced at the trunk and said, "Found something!"
When we all went up one right after another, we saw a wonderful view from the tee canopy. We looked out at the valley and saw that the tree canopies were painted a golden yellow in the sunset. It had been many years since I got to see such a view. Kan Jian pointed to a branch in the canopy that had a mass of ck and white things hanging on it. When I went over to get a look at it, I found that it was dried snakeskin. Someone had killed snakes here and there were hundreds of them.
This particr snakeskin was very big, so I went in for a closer look at it. It was the skin of a cobra, but that didnt mean anything since it was a tradition to eat snakes here. I looked up at the canopy and saw a bunch of leftover snake bones.
Even if Poker-Face and the others were just passing by here, they didnt have to eat so many snakes. These snakeskins must have been processed here by the local snake wranglers. It looked like hundreds of them had been hung up over the years, which showed that this ce wasnt a deep mountain.
"Is this the mark?" Kan Jian asked. I shook my head and looked around. There were snakeskins littering the ground around the other tree trunks and hanging from their branches. I slowly looked around, carefully examining everything. There were thousands of snakeskins hanging in the tree canopies here.
I felt like something was off, so I said to the others, "Be careful. There may be something here."
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TN Notes:
(1) Its thergest and tallest tulou in Yongding District, covering an area of more than 10,000 square meters. The main building is 6 stories tall. It was built between 1851-1874. More info is on slide 19 here (scroll down a bit for the full paragraph) or the middle of footnote 19 at the bottom of the webpage (you can ctrl+f "Yong Longchang").