I looked straight at the stripes on the giant tree behind the bald man, and immediately leaned in, and pushed aside the bald man who was still incomprehensible between me and the giant tree;

Sure enough, there were three or five peculiar dents in the weathered bark, which had become as hard as fossils, and my previous judgment of these dents was wrong, they were not "streaks", but clearly notches that had been deliberately cut with chisels and axes!

"Bald, you can be saved, I have found the mark you left before!" I was excited, like a shriveled old man hiking in the desert who suddenly discovered an oasis;

The bald man thought I was fooling him, and he didn't move for a long time, and when he saw that there were indeed marks on the tree, he squatted down with me on the shoulder;

I stroked the jagged grooves and asked, "Why are you carving so much?" And also... How did you carve such a deep groove at the time? ”

When the bald man heard this, he looked at the carvings carefully and repeatedly several times, and suddenly pressed my head and connected me to himself, and lay down on the ground together, and then with the voice squeezed out of his throat, he beckoned the dumb man to take the tiger girl, and hurried closer to us.

He was so strange that I fell to the ground and was stunned for a moment, but then I looked up at the insignificant carving, which was now above our heads, and then closed my mouth;

It is not difficult to see from the bald man's actions that this complicated and different engraving is not at all the marks left by the bald man before, and it is also my momentary negligence, in fact, as long as I think about it, I know that the bald man more than a month ago did not have the ability and tools to leave such deep grooves;

It was so quiet that I could hear my own heartbeat for more than a minute, but not a single leaf had fallen, let alone the enemy we had been worried about.

I tried to pretend to be brave and lifted up, knelt in front of the giant tree and stroked the carvings with my hands, and suddenly felt that something was wrong, and the grooves and carvings within reach had the same feel and texture as the bark itself;

In other words, these carvings were not recent, and from the perspective of weathering and petrification as the bark, it is not known that they had existed on the trees for more than a year, and even when they were far less tall than they are today, they were chiseled into the trees with a hard object like a chisel.

Yes, it must be a chisel, and the depth and width of each cut are uniform, which is not something that can be done with a tool like an axe or a sharp stone!

The light was getting darker and darker, and the bark was already slippery with a lot of moss and green algae, and it would have been hard to spot the carvings buried under the moss and dirt had it not been for the lucky bump of a bald man;

A strange thought swirled in my mind: could this be the deliberate words left by the person who carved the stele to instruct us what to do?

I took a handful of blades of grass on the ground, held them in my hands and wiped the carvings, so that I could see them clearly with the only light source, I wanted to stick my whole face on the bark, but in the end I had no choice but to sit back on the ground, because those carvings were not words, not even patterns, they were carved for the sake of carving.

"Don't be nervous, it's okay, these things have been engraved here for years", I patted the mute next to me;

"How long ago?" , the bald man looked around vigilantly and asked;

"Long enough for them to grow into trees", there is no year in the native language, and the concept of the number of thousand years is enough for a bald man to understand, and I can only tell him in a way that he can understand;

As I spoke, I wiped a handful of moss on the top of the carved mark as if I were wiping a window, but I found that there was such a notch there, and I wiped it again... And one more!

"Huh?" At the same time, the speed of wiping on the hands began to become faster, and finally even pulled the bald man and the mute together, and wiped the moss off the surface of the bark with grass blades and grass stems.

The sight before us surprised each of us, only to see that on this tree, from the position of the top of a person's head downward, there are actually all over this kind of carvings, horizontal and vertical, crooked, limited to the particularity of the tool "chisel", these carvings are also carved at one end deep and the other carved significantly shallower, as if the shallow end was only gently carried by a chisel;

"Dumb, don't go far, look at the trees around here, are there such things?" , I commanded;

"Bald, you pull a few strips of cloth from your trousers, mix them with tree oil and light a torch," I said after a pause.

"Wu, what does this mean?" , The bald man did not do things obediently like a dumb man, he didn't even get up, he still asked.

Before I could speak, the dumb man had already walked back, and instead of gesturing with his hand, he pointed to a nearby tree with his finger, and then nodded heavily to me......

In the space of ten minutes, the three of them divided into three directions to clean the moss from the trunks of more than a dozen nearby trees, and found that at least five or six giant trees had carved such grooves on their surfaces!

"Is this the kind of writing you write in the tribe?" The bald man seemed to recall the sign outside the oracle of the gentle slope, on which there were many stories I had written in charcoal;

I shook my head at him and asked, "Do you know each other?" But the faces of the two people who could see it were also dazed;

They weren't at least the boring creations of the people who carved them, and in fact I had an answer in my mind as to what they were for, but I turned to the bald man and asked, "What do you think they're for?" ”；

The bald man looked at me and then at the grooves and said, "If these are really carved, then this person is probably lost like us, and he can't get out of this forest, so he left a mark";

"No, he didn't need to stay so much! If it's just because I'm lost, then one is enough", I shook my head, as if I was speaking to the two people around me, but I was telling myself;

"You see, these grooves are thick at one end, thin at one end, deep at one end and shallow at one end, what does this mean?" , I asked to the bald man;

"He's giving directions to his companions?" , the bald man seems to be in a trance;

"No, it wouldn't take so many engravings either! If you were a bald man, you would be even more confused when you saw such a chaotic direction guide! ”；

The bald man nodded speechlessly, and I paced back and forth from tree to tree, while the two of them stuck behind me and watched me;

"Therefore, these engravings are not for the convenience of others, on the contrary, they are showing him the way, he may be lost like us and can't get out, there is a possibility... He seems to be looking for something around here! ”。