"The deputy squad leader also took off his clothes and jumped into the water. The three of them dived again and the water was stirred up. Wang Sichuan was a hot-headed person and he also took off his clothes, revealing his black skin, and wanted to go down to help. I stopped him. Three people were enough. If one more big guy went down, he would definitely make things worse."
The underwater movement was significant, and the swaying of the wire mesh disrupted our boat. I lay flat on the boat, trying to maintain balance. Soon, the deputy leader floated up, dragging something green in his hand. Two more soldiers followed suit, and together they splashed and shook the water. Suddenly, a bag-like object was lifted out of the water. As they were close to our boat, the object flipped onto our rubber raft, splashing us in the face.
"We were startled at first, thinking it was a dead body. However, upon closer inspection, we realized it was actually a decaying dark green bag with several cuts from the wire mesh on it. Inside the bag were rusted wires that held the bag stiff, giving it the appearance of a rigid person. We mistook it for a body due to its appearance. The bag was incredibly disgusting, covered in rust and dirty water from being submerged for years. It was also extremely heavy, causing the back of the boat to lift up when we put it on board."
Chen Lu Hu was timid and immediately shrunk back in fear, almost shrinking out of the boat. Wang Sichuan hurriedly grabbed him. The three of them climbed back onto the boat gasping for breath. The deputy squad leader frowned and looked at the sack, then gave two soldiers a beating and scolded them, "What kind of look is that? Is this how your family treats their dead?"
The two soldiers felt embarrassed and scratched their heads. Then they were ordered to go down and cut the barbed wire. The sergeant seemed a bit displeased and explained to us, "These two new soldiers are cowards."
Actually, we were scared too. When that thing went "bang" and landed in our boat, it was very frightening. Later, I realized that these engineers probably don't like us technical folks and are trying to mess with us.
"Wang Sichuan shone a flashlight on the burlap sack and asked me, 'Is this something left behind by the Japanese?'"
"I said obviously, I still recognize this kind of sack called a buffering bag, which was used as temporary cover during blasting. There used to be yellow sand in this sack, but now it has been washed away by water and nothing remains. This sack may have accidentally fallen into the water during transportation back then. It seems the Japanese had a relatively large blast inside."
Everyone thought it made sense and I was about to continue explaining when Wang Sichuan suddenly interrupted me. He didn't know what he saw, but he grabbed the rotten burlap sack and said to me, "No, Lao Wu, this really is a dead body."
Speaking, he tore open the burlap bag that had already become as soft as rotted cotton, and we saw that among the tangled iron wires inside, a skeleton was bound tightly. The wires were wrapped tightly around the bones, wrapping his body into a cocoon. The skeleton had obviously experienced a fierce struggle before death, so the whole burlap bag presented such a strange appearance.
"The corpse has already been half skeletal. This person was so thin that there wasn't much left to rot, so even now the wire was wrapped very tightly. When we saw the extremely painful and twisted face of the corpse, we all felt a shiver run down our spines."
After nearly forty years, the situation at that time is still vivid in my memory. This is a true story and I am not exaggerating at all. I did see a corpse in that cave, and the eerie feeling still haunts me today. People who haven't seen it with their own eyes simply cannot understand that kind of scene. It's insane that the Japanese came up with the idea of using Chinese people as living bombs.
"We had been silent for a long time. Wang Sichuan was the most passionate among us, with a complexion even darker than Judge Bao's."
"At that time, the atmosphere suddenly became very serious because of the corpse. Those two soldiers climbed up after cutting the barbed wire. Looking at our expressions, they didn't know what happened. Later, we pushed the corpse back into the water before continuing our journey."
"The waterway behind us was silent all the way. Joking about it felt inappropriate. To shift our attention, we all turned to look at the rocky wall on one side."
As the terrain gets lower, the geological structure inside the cave begins to change, revealing increasingly bizarre and strange scenery. The characteristics of limestone karst caves begin to replace those of structural caves, with the appearance of stone waterfalls and seepage phenomena. We all put on rain hats.
However, from the surface evidence, it is difficult to say whether the cave system here was formed earlier than the geological structural caves, or vice versa. The age of geological structural caves is generally over millions of years, while the age of karst cave systems varies from 100,000 to 200 million years, with too much flexibility and no comparability.
However, in general, the underground large karst caves in ordinary karst landforms seem like a net, with layers upon layers interconnected and seemingly random. Absolutely no river flows downward for sightseeing. It is reasonable to believe that the geological structure of this cave system was formed during the orogenesis of the uplifted mountains from the ocean billions of years ago. Afterwards, the underground river formed, and then the erosion of the limestone in this area led to the appearance of the karst cave features.
Further down the cave, due to water infiltration, the surface limestone is carried into the deeper parts of the cave system, making the erosion more severe. However, at a certain depth, the cave will return to its original geological structure because the pressure from the ground is too great for the karst topography to withstand.
"These are the results of our exploration at that time, and what we were all interested in was where the end of this underground river would be. With such a large amount of water, it is hard to imagine that all of it will seep into the cracks of the rock and become groundwater if there is no underground lake at the end."
"We have also calculated the approximate time. Based on the current gentle slope and not considering detours, in terms of absolute time, we should be about 16 kilometers away from the 1,200-meter vertical drop. If everything goes according to plan and we rest on time tonight, we should arrive tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. Of course, the premise is that we have taken the correct fork in the road and the river channel has no twists and turns; otherwise, it will be a disaster and who knows where we will end up."
"Our prediction was perfectly proven right at the beginning. When we looked at the barometer, at a depth of about 320 meters from the ground, a large number of cave characteristics suddenly appeared, turning the rock walls on both sides of the underground river into a terrifying and complicated painting, with plate-like stone waterfalls and jagged stone threads everywhere. Overhead, suspended stone bridges appeared, and sometimes the stone waterfalls hung down, pressing against our heads, forcing us to crouch to pass through. The scenery unseen by anyone for millions of years was gradually revealed before us, giving us a feeling of being in the middle of a pile of giant beasts' bones, unsure whether we were afraid or excited."
In 1962, a novel was published domestically called "Journey to the Center of the Earth," which also depicted similar scenes.
However, soon our theoretical deduction encountered a huge challenge. After we sailed past a huge rocky waterfall, a giant stone appeared in the river ahead, blocking our passage. The flow of the river was difficult to navigate due to these stones, and our raft got stuck in the crevices of the rock while the rapids rushed past.
"Geological collapse," Pei Qing shone the flashlight and explained, "These rocks fell from the top of the cave when it collapsed due to erosion."
"Who doesn't know?" Wang Sichuan said, "Damn it, who's going to give me a hand to go up and take a look?"
When we climbed up onto a rock to take a look, we saw an unexpected scene: a chaotic boulder dam had formed ahead of us, blocking the river's flow and diverting the water downstream through the jumbled rocks.
On the rocky shore, irregular stones scattered everywhere, some as large as truck heads, while others only fist-sized, extremely uneven. Surprisingly, in the crevices between these chaotic stones were filled with black bags we just pulled from underwater wire mesh. Many bags had rotten away, leaving behind various eerie remains tangled within the wire mesh, presenting a scene resembling hell.