Fortunately, this is not a swamp in the true sense of the word, and there is no sinister mechanism, otherwise, our wave of people would have to sink in the sand here.

Thinking of this, I couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat. Finally climbed the hillside, the sun had already set halfway up the mountainside, and the five-colored glow spread on the blue lake was beautiful.

I almost snapped my eyes at the sight, and I couldn't help myself as I stood on the hillside and looked down.

"This place is so beautiful." Xu Yaxian stood beside me and took a deep breath, "If I really live in such a place, I don't think it's any different from an immortal." ”

"Lin Kun, we can't stay here, it's best to enter the forest immediately, this area is an open area, and your whereabouts will be exposed at any time." Ciwang reminded.

"Then let's go in from here!" I pointed to the rift valley in front of the mountain forest and said, "That place is like a cliff, a moat, easy to defend and difficult to attack, and it is more likely that the madman village is on the opposite side." ”

Ciwang took out an antique telescope and looked inside, and after a while, he excitedly shouted, "There are people there, come and see." ”

I took the binoculars and looked where he was pointing, and saw the roof of a stilted building through the dense branches.

"Great, there's a family on the edge of a cliff." I handed the telescope to Ren Yonghai, "Old Ren, have you seen it?" ”

Although they walked the mountain road for nearly a day, no one in the team shouted tiredness and bitterness, not even Xu Yaxian frowned, everyone was eager to find the madman village before dark.

As we traveled deep into the dense jungle, Tsewang's keen instincts allowed us to avoid traps several times, one of which was that they had dug a large pit four feet square, more than three meters deep, and the bottom was covered with sharp spiked wooden stakes, which would have to be pierced if we were not careful.

Finally out of the forest, we arrived at a cliff, from the cliff to look down, we saw that there is a small village on the opposite cliff, they are clustered, and scattered, it is estimated that this is the "madman village" we are looking for.

"Look, we're here."

"But how are we going to get there?" Jampa found a rope bridge pile foundation above the cliff, where it was clear that there was once a chain bridge connecting the two sides, but now the chain bridge has been demolished.

"This cliff is supposed to be a rift valley that stretches from the foot of the mountain to here, and the straight line between the two points is the shortest, so it makes sense that the people here built a chain bridge here in the first place." "But now that the chain bridge has been demolished and we're standing on both sides of the cliff, it's really hard to get past it." ”

"How did they get into the village before the chain bridge was installed?" Ren Yonghai asked.

"It's very simple, take a long detour, either up from the other side of the mountain, or climb all the way up from the valley floor below, you see over there." I pointed to a trail on the cliff on the other side and said, "This bird path should be their way into the mountain." ”

Overlooking the northeastern edge of the Hengduan Mountains, with its peaks and valleys, it is home to China's largest Yi ethnic group, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. In Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, there is a village called Atuler. It is located in the Meigu River Grand Canyon area under the Lion Mountain in the southern section of the Daliang Mountain System, in the east of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and north of Jiermo Township, and is a veritable "cliff village".

Cliff Village sits on the sloped shoulder of the Grand Canyon, where people have lived for generations, and the place is like the middle of three steps, about 800 meters perpendicular to the ground. The village leads to the outside world, and 17 rattan ladders need to be climbed intermittently along the cliff, of which the two almost vertical vine ladders close to the village are about 100 meters long. The history of cliff village dating back 200 years. At that time, the village of Atulal was isolated from the rest of the world, and because of its special geographical location, there were no bandits and no wars. The land is fertile, the villagers are self-sufficient, and life is much more comfortable and affluent than in other turbulent places.

The villagers have to climb the cliffs with a drop of 800 meters along the rattan ladder out of the mountain.

"This place is even better than the famous 'Cliff Village'." Ren Yonghai said.

The "Crazy Village" is about one kilometer long from east to west, hundreds of meters wide, high in the east and low in the west, with a difference of about 400 meters. In addition to the original chain bridge, there are several rattan stairs that go down the cliff, some of which are almost 90 degrees vertical, and the cliff is almost unobstructed when you look down.

These rattan ladders have a long history, and with the wind, rain and sun, plus climbing up and down, the rattan ladders have been damaged in many places. There are hundreds of acres of land and dozens of families scattered in the village. The houses are adobe walls, mostly made of wood made of local materials. It is conceivable that some large items will not be bought by the villagers because they cannot go up the mountain. Even if you go down the mountain, you still have to buy some daily necessities, as well as production tools and fertilizers. In addition, the cattle, sheep and pigs raised in the village cannot be transported to the bottom of the mountain for trading, so they are all produced and sold.

"I didn't expect the environment in this madman village to be so bad, why don't you say they moved out?"

"If you move out, you may lose your land or even your source of livelihood, and when you move to the nearest city, you can only choose labor-based coolie work." Ren Yonghai said in his analysis that if the income in the city is not high, it will be difficult to face the high cost of living, and the one-time resettlement fee of tens of thousands of yuan cannot fully guarantee their future livelihood. Therefore, relocation does not solve the problem completely.

His statement has a certain basis, but it may not be applicable to the "madman village", because this village is in Heiyun Village, and there is a more suitable place to live at the foot of the mountain, but it is a big problem to choose such a "dangerous place" to survive.

The vegetation on the mountain is dense, the water and soil are suitable, it stands to reason that the crops here are high, the villagers are completely self-sufficient, and the villagers have basically no problem with food and clothing.

"In the past, there were no roads to avoid war and danger, but now they limit the development of the village." Ren Yonghai is quite confident in his judgment.

After all, a village like this is not unique in the Hengduan Mountains.

"Lin Kun, what do you think?" Ciwang walked up to me and asked.

"Lao Ren has a certain truth." I didn't rush to refute Ren Yonghai, but squatted on the ground to investigate the structure of the cliff, and found that the cliff was mainly composed of basalt, and it was very difficult to dig a road on the cliff wall, "However, have you ever thought about it, why was this originally the only passage to the outside world demolished?" ”

Although the valley under our feet is not too long, only two or three miles, the valley is very deep and the canyon is majestic. Such a place, unless you really aspire to sit as a hermit, can be regarded as a "peach blossom spring", I don't know that there is a Qin and Han dynasties, regardless of the Wei and Jin dynasties.

"What are you trying to express?"

"Let's think about it from another angle, is it worth the people of Heiyun Village who are worthy of the people of Heiyun Village to design and create so many traps and defend this place so tightly? Is there treasure or beauty here? ”

Everyone shook their heads in confusion.

"I think that this so-called forbidden place is not to prevent outsiders from coming in, or rather, not only to prevent outsiders, but more importantly, to prevent those inside from going out!"

As soon as these words came out, everyone present was speechless.

"This ......" everyone looked at each other.

"Lin Kun's words also have some truth, I don't know if you have heard of a disease called leprosy?" Xu Yaxian looked at the barren grass village and asked.

Leprosy is a very old infectious disease. Before the invention of chemotherapy drugs such as dapsone, leprosy was difficult to cure. Lepers will inexplicably ulcerate and deepen the skin of their faces, eyes, hands, and feet, and slowly develop to the point of deformation, paralysis, and death, and more terrifyingly, people who come into contact with them will slowly develop similar symptoms.

As Susan Sontag said in The Metaphor of Disease, any disease with an unknown cause and ineffective treatment is easy to be covered by some kind of metaphor. In both the West and China, due to the limitations of medical technology, fearful people could not explain these phenomena and considered these leprosy people to be "sinners and unclean people", and that their illness was punished by God. In the 12th century, Catholicism had decided that leprosy patients must be completely isolated, and these "living dead" were driven to leprosy asylas established in various places, and Foucault recorded in "Madness and Civilization" that there were as many as 19,000 leprosy institutions throughout Christendom; The patients in the leprosy hospital have also lost all their rights and freedoms as human beings.

Now, the disease has been largely eliminated from the world, so much so that many people don't know anything about it. But in the not-so-distant history, leprosy has caused countless illnesses, disabilities, discrimination, panic and human tragedy. The terrible external symptoms of leprosy, which causes hair loss, collapsed eyes and noses, and deformities of limbs, together with its contagious nature, make people extremely fearful and stigmatize leprosy. In the history of countries around the world, it is not uncommon for lepers to be isolated, burned or buried alive.

As a result, most of the leprosy patients voluntarily or involuntarily gathered in these leprosy villages and hospitals. In order to better eliminate the possibility of leprosy infection, most of these isolation sites are built in inaccessible mountains or isolated islands, and the good conditions rely on churches and office buildings left over from the Republic of China, and the poor conditions are only a few earthen walls and stone bricks, especially in the remote southwest region.

I know what she means, and before I came here, I had also made several turns in my mind around the madman village, but I didn't have the slightest idea except for some fragmented clues, and I really couldn't think of a reason.

But when I saw Xu Yaxian pick up the conversation, I asked her rhetorically, "Did you think of something?" ”

She said as she walked: "First of all, the news of 'Crazy Village' has been reported before, and this matter will not be groundless, it can be regarded as eight or nine and ten. Whether or not the white-haired thing they were talking about is a zombie or not. ”

I didn't even think about it, so I nodded and agreed: "Xu Yaxian is right, there must be a reason for the groundlessness, and there must be an article in it." ”