Chapter 12: Memories of Panma
After that, my conversation with Daddy Panma lasted more than three hours, and I kept asking questions, trying to find out the secret as I learned what had happened.
The content of the conversation is very scattered, and the father speaks and Agui translates, and sometimes he has to explain the concepts to each other, which takes a lot of time. And my dad didn't cooperate with my problem very much, maybe there were some deviations in Gui's translation. So after the conversation, my mind was completely fragmented.
The year they entered the mountain was probably 1976, and the old man couldn't tell the time with certainty.
At that time, it should have been Wenjin who led the team, but when I took out a photo of Xisha for my dad to see, he couldn't distinguish the others. There were too many people for too long, and in that environment at that time, everyone had a hairstyle and a kind of clothes, and he only remembered the only one to lead the team, which was very reasonable.
You must know that around 197, almost all of the people around Si were the People's Liberation Army, and most of the roads in the mountains were dug out during the counterattack against Vietnam, and the troops had to go into the mountains to find guides, which was a military task.
Panma received the allowance of the army, he was still in the prime of life, and when he was hunting, he walked the farthest and deepest alone, so he was naturally the most suitable person to be a guide.
They set out early in the morning of the same day, and he did not bother to ask for more details about the task of the troops, but only led the troops to the Sheep Horn Mountain, and then followed the troops. His mind was on remembering the way, he hadn't been to Sheephorn Mountain, and he had to make sure he could return safely.
They walked for a long time, spent the night in the mountains, and came to a lake in the mountains.
Panma had only been to that place once, and that was when he was thirty-one years old, and he married his wife and wanted to beat a few roe deer and go back to invite his uncle. That year, the mountains were not very peaceful, and the wild beasts hid in the mountains. He came in with his dog all the way, found the lake, and ambushed it for a day before he hunted a wild boar. He hasn't been there since.
Naturally, that kind of lake has no name, and perhaps no one in the village knows that there is a lake except for Panma. The lake was a dead lake, there was no stream, and he did not know if there was any other place under it, so the troops set up camp and set up tents by the lake, and then the task of coiling the horses was completed.
Next, he was responsible for giving some supplies to the troops every few days, and the troops themselves were well supplied, so he only brought some rice or salt with him every time he went into the mountains. The strange thing that Agui said happened on one of them. During this time, no one knew what that unit was stationed there for.
In the process, Panma was curious, but he also knew that in those years, the cost of snooping on these things was too great, so he held back his curiosity. Later, when the team started, there were many more boxes, about thirty, each the size of a shoebox. The soldier was very careful to bring it out.
Curious, he once wanted to take one, but was very tactfully stopped by a soldier. The soldier said that the contents of this box were very dangerous, and he took an opportunity to take it, but he felt that it was very heavy, and he did not know what it contained.
When I heard this, I probably had some impression in my mind that this kind of shoebox-sized box, called the storage box, nicknamed the Gu Dong box, was used by the archaeological team to store the fragments of cultural relics unearthed and sorted. This kind of box is generally strictly numbered, some large and some small, but most of them are shoebox sizes, and the unearthed cultural relics are generally heavier, and the weight accommodated by the size of the shoebox is the most suitable for handling.
Panma wondered where the contents of the box came from, because there was nothing special on the edge of the lake? He thought that the box must be filled with stones, because there was a large rocky beach on the edge of the lake, and there were many, many stones.
However, he soon realized that something was wrong, because after a period of walking in the mountains, a strange smell began to emanate from the box, which was very unpleasant and indescribable.