Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 4: A and B

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 4: A and B

Sima Hui would sometimes think: “Luck has something of a woman’s temperament about it. The more desperately you want it, the further away it moves. Yet the moment you’ve given up all hope of it, it may well come knocking at your door on its own.”

The situation now was a perfect proof of this idea. After the Communist Party of Burma guerrillas scattered, Sima Hui and the other survivors had decided to risk crossing the Savage Mountains to return to China. Though they knew full well this was a road to death with no chance of survival, they had no choice but to press forward with gritted teeth. But just when everyone had abandoned all hope, Karaweik had pointed them toward a secret military road. Sima Hui knew this matter ran very deep and did not dare accept it lightly. He had A Cui carefully question Karaweik about exactly where the notebook and the tiger-head patch had come from, while he and Luo Dahai went through the notebook page by page, hoping to find their answers inside.

After roughly half an hour, Sima Hui had finally pieced together the full story. It turned out that deep in the heart of the Savage Mountains, a strategic road was hidden, one that had been built jointly by China and America during the Second World War and named after General Stilwell, commander of the China-Burma-India Theater. History knew it as the Stilwell Road. The Stilwell Road stretched over a thousand kilometers in total, passing through India, Burma, Yunnan, and Guizhou, linking up with the Burma Road. Most of the terrain it crossed was through the foothills of the Himalayan range, a region of countless towering mountains and deep gorges, and one of the most rugged and complex landscapes on earth. It was as though the ground here had suddenly been thrown up into endless folds, with elevation changes in some places reaching three or four thousand meters.

There was a famous wartime photographic image known around the world: a convoy of American transport trucks winding slowly along a steep mountain road. The narrow road was treacherously precipitous, featuring dozens of sharp hairpin turns in the space of just a few kilometers. Another photograph from the same location showed only the road itself, curling and switchbacking without a truck in sight. This famous stretch of “Twenty-Four Turns” was one section of the Stilwell Road.

During the construction of this road, the war had entered its most intense phase. The American Volunteer Group supporting China flew transport planes back and forth continuously along the Hump Route, but the carrying capacity of air transport was always limited, and the flying conditions along this route were exceptionally treacherous, with planes going down constantly at great cost. The air corridor alone was not enough to fully meet the ever-growing material demands of the entire Chinese theater of war, so the military decided to push a road through the primeval jungle.

Burma at that time was already under Japanese occupation. The Chinese and American engineer corps paid an enormous price to complete this mission. They cut roads through mountains and built bridges over rivers, fighting constantly against Japanese forces even as they worked. Every kilometer of road cost lives. It could be said that this winding, treacherous road was built almost entirely from the precious lives of soldiers.

What few people knew was that the Stilwell Road was not a single road. Beyond the two major routes known at the time as the Southern Segment and the Northern Segment, a number of branch roads had also branched off along the way. Most of these had been abandoned and rerouted midway through construction due to complex geological conditions and environments too hostile to work in, and so along the winding, strained course of the Stilwell Road, many abandoned branch sections had been left behind.

The longest of these abandoned stretches appeared in northern Burma’s Savage Mountains, where the joint Chinese-American engineer corps, working deep in the mountain forests, had found a derelict road left over from the Anglo-Burmese Wars.

Long before, in the era of Western colonial expansion, the French had grouped Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos under their control under the collective name Indochina, while Burma was a British colony. In the deep mountain forests of northern Burma, there was a region that had never clearly belonged to anyone. Both the British and French had poured enormous resources into building roads and railways there, each hoping to bring this territory under their control. But the difficulties and dangers they encountered in the Savage Mountains far exceeded all expectations, costing many lives, and they never managed to complete their work. Each side had also consistently kept quiet about the terrifying incidents they encountered in the Savage Mountains.

In a Burmese temple, a scroll bearing an ancient map of unknown origins had been kept hidden. The map depicted a place in the Savage Mountains called the “Elephant Gate.” The name was that of a geographical feature, but it was actually a very deep valley. The valley environment was cold and damp, particularly well suited to Burmese pythons, and it was said that the valley was a burial ground for wild elephant herds. Though the ruins of the old era had long since vanished without a trace, when constructing the Stilwell Road, American military engineers still consulted this ancient map and, following the lay of the mountain ranges, built the road winding like a serpent, hoping to connect it with the derelict sections left behind by the British. This too in the end proved impossible, and the stretch of road lying in the remote and silent dead zone of northern Burma’s mountains was gradually forgotten by the world, until at last it had become a Ghost Road in every sense of the name, with no one able to know its exact location any longer.

At the time, in order to effectively coordinate Chinese and American military operations, many lower and mid-ranking Chinese officers who had received training from American instructors in India and could speak English were pulled out and incorporated into American units. Among these was a second lieutenant surnamed Xu, named Xu Ping’an, who was assigned to the “6th Independent Combat Engineer Battalion of the US Army” and accompanied this unit in the grueling task of building the road through the Savage Mountains. He was unlucky enough to be wounded in an ambush engagement with Japanese forces, suffering severe burns to his face that destroyed his looks and leaving him with permanent physical disabilities. After recovering, he could not bring himself to return home and chose to remain in northern Burma, where he married a local woman.

Xu Ping’an was Karaweik’s grandfather. He had recorded everything he witnessed and experienced in the Savage Mountains in the form of a notebook. But the man had died at a relatively young age, and the generations that came after him had assimilated into local customs, growing up entirely in the mountains. Though of Chinese descent, they had even lost the ability to speak much Chinese.

Because Karaweik was of Chinese descent and had also had his life saved by Xia Tiedong, he felt close to the Chinese people in the Communist Party of Burma guerrilla unit and considered them family. Though he could not follow much of what Sima Hui and the others kept discussing among themselves, he could see that these people were heading into the terrifyingly dangerous Savage Mountains. There was a very special spice unique to Burma, made by digging up the roots of old trees from the forest to use as material for burning incense, then grinding it slowly and finely into powder. The Savage Mountains had many ancient trees that had grown for hundreds and thousands of years. Xu Ping’an had known the terrain inside the mountains and kept track of where the various road sections ran, so he would often go into the mountains to dig up tree roots and make and sell spices, or gather medicinal herbs from dry cliff faces, earning his daily living this way.

Karaweik had gone into the mountains with his family multiple times to gather medicine and knew how to find the paths. Now, many years later, the military transport road built in those times had long since been buried under soil and vegetation, and large sections had been crushed under collapsed mountain terrain. Aside from Karaweik, it would be very difficult for anyone else to find the buried timber road base hidden beneath the surface.

Xu Ping’an’s notebook contained no drawn map, but through written description it provided a detailed account of the terrain inside the Savage Mountains. This range was long from east to west and narrow from north to south, running on a northwest-to-southeast axis. The terrain at its heart was the most rugged and complex, with dense vegetation, an extraordinary number of underground caves, and a heavy mist that accumulated over years and never fully dispersed. The Stilwell Road came up from the south, wound its way to the Savage Mountains area, and then branched into a Y-shape. The fork in the center split into two routes: the right side was marked as Route 719A and the left side as Route 206B. The Americans referred to them collectively as the Ghost Road. Route A curved around the outer edge of the right side of the Savage Mountains. Though winding and long, it was the relatively safer of the two. Route B made use of many natural caves and bored tunnels through the mountains, making it the most direct route in terms of straight-line distance to the Chinese-Burmese border.

But the region through which Ghost Road Route B passed was the most terrifying terrain in the entire Savage Mountains. During the construction of the road tunnels, it was discovered that most of the cave fissures in the heart of the Savage Mountains had dense white mist pouring out of them. None of the scouts who went in ever came back. As the project pushed deeper, more and more personnel from the 6th Independent Combat Engineer Battalion of the US Army went missing there, their whereabouts still unknown to this day.

There were at least three different theories about the dense mist rising from underground. As early as the colonial period, a British explorer had put forward the view that it was “miasma,” arguing that the mist contained powerfully toxic substances that would cause cardiac arrest upon inhalation. This theory was later ruled out after investigation. Another theory was the common folk belief that deep within the Elephant Gate there lived a great black python that the locals called the “Long Serpent,” which many among the common people worshipped as a deity. Said to be several li in length, it inhaled and exhaled clouds and mist, and any person or animal passing nearby would be sucked into the python’s belly. It was also said that the streams flowing out of the mist would pass over mountains of accumulated white bones saturated with the python’s venomous saliva, making them absolutely impossible to drink.

The claim that a great python beneath the earth swallowed clouds and breathed mist was widely believed to be true, but if you asked anyone who had personally witnessed it, they would shake their heads repeatedly. Then in the same breath they would swear on the Buddha that people had indeed seen such a thing in the Savage Mountains. Going back and forth, it was impossible to determine what was true and what was not, and there was very little hope of getting any reliable information out of the local people.

Others still claimed that in ancient times the native people, in order to guard the hidden secrets of the Savage Mountains, had placed a curse on the water sources. Anyone afflicted by it would be beyond all help, with absolutely no hope of recovery.

In short, the mere mention of the Savage Mountains was enough to make those who had seen it tremble and those who had only heard of it go pale. It was as though the place were a demon capable of devouring all life. The many bizarre legends surrounding it were like the layers of thick mist coiling endlessly through those mountains, strange and obscure, impossible to fathom, enough to make anyone stop in their tracks.

The Route B road built by the American engineer battalion had ultimately been forced to a halt midway, the obstacles to construction too great to overcome. Route A, which went around the western side of the Savage Mountains, had also never been fully completed in the end, but it could skirt around the Savage Mountains through relatively safer terrain. The estimated travel time was around ten or more days.

Karaweik had been worried that if Sima Hui and the other three ventured into the primeval jungle and lost their way, they might wander into the deep mountains and the python mist and lose their lives. On top of that, during the Second World War, the Japanese had used aircraft to sow mines, dropping large numbers of land mines directly into the mountains from the air, where after rainfall they would be covered by soil and vegetation, leaving no trace whatsoever. Karaweik had gone into the mountains many times with his grandfather and knew which areas were dense with mines. This was the real reason he wanted to come along. He intended to guide everyone to Route A of the Ghost Road and lead them to the vicinity of the northern Burma Triangle, which was already not far from the national border.

Sima Hui was deeply moved, and reflected that these past years of being cut off from all news, with only secondhand rumors to go on, left him with no clear picture of what conditions in the country were actually like now. But their whole group had all sneaked out as fugitives in the first place, and now they were defeated soldiers with nothing to be proud of, with no excuse to offer for what they had done back then. If by some miracle they survived long enough to go back, it would be a miraculous stroke of wishful thinking to hope they wouldn’t be charged with treason and betrayal. Even if they escaped being shot, they would probably spend the rest of their lives rotting in prison. As for the boy Karaweik, there was naturally no way to take him into China. The best outcome would be that after leaving the Savage Mountains he could go to a temple and become a monk, living out his life as a Buddhist priest in peace and stability. But at the same time Sima Hui knew that if Karaweik remained in Burma, he would ultimately have no way to avoid being hunted down. Death was the only end that awaited him there. But the finality of that fate was too cruel, and Sima Hui could not bring himself to dwell on it.

A Cui reached out with gentle affection and rubbed Karaweik’s half-shaved head: “This child has such a good heart.”

Then she shot Luo Dahai a sharp look, apparently blaming him for always losing his temper at Karaweik before.

Luo Dahai felt a little awkward. He was rough around the edges by nature and not good at expressing genuine feelings. For all his usual talkativeness, at a moment like this he found himself short of words, and could only force himself into the pose of someone “concerned about the development of the younger generation,” saying to Karaweik in his breezy, offhand way: “Didn’t expect you to be such a brave one, you little shaved-headed sneak. Today… I guess Luo Dahai owes you one.”

Sima Hui understood very clearly that though Luo Dahai had said it lightly, those words already meant he was willing to die in Karaweik’s place. But for reasons he could not explain, after hearing all of this, a nameless sense of dread suddenly surged up in Sima Hui’s heart. He could not shake the feeling that this journey would bring more disaster than fortune. He didn’t know why he had such a bad premonition, and privately thought it might be better to simply stay in the primeval jungle and live as a wild man. Rather than going back to walk into death, why not hide deep in the mountains and never come out?

But A Cui and Luo Dahai were both burning with homesickness and urged Sima Hui to move out immediately. The further north they went, the safer they would be, and if they waited until the tropical storm “Stupa” arrived, there would be no leaving at all.

Sima Hui had no choice but to pull himself together and follow the other three down toward the mountain gorge to the west. Because of the uneven terrain, what looked like a short straight-line distance through the deep mountain forests turned out to be extraordinarily difficult and slow going. They climbed over mountain after mountain, and by the time evening was drawing in, they still had not reached Ghost Road Route A. The four of them had not brought a single scrap of food, and after walking for so many hours in the mountains, the hunger was unbearable. They caught two grass snakes to fill their stomachs, but with four people and so little food, it barely made a difference. At some point Luo Dahai happened to look up and spotted an unfamiliar wild bird perched in an old tree above. The bird had emerald and blue feathers and was quite beautiful. Its body was a good size, and its call sounded like someone knocking on a hollow bamboo tube.

Birds were the most plentiful creatures in the primeval jungle, and most of them were strange and exotic in shape. They generally had no fear of humans, having perhaps never encountered a person before, and seemed to assume that humans were much the same as monkeys. When they saw someone pass by, they would just stare blankly and call out at you.

Luo Dahai thought to himself that they were deep enough into the mountains that even a loud gunshot would not risk drawing any enemies. He swallowed hard, raised the British rifle, aligned the three points into one line, and squeezed the trigger. With a crack of the shot, the bird fell from the old tree. The gunshot also startled a great flock of roosting birds in the forest, which wheeled above the treetops in mournful cries that lingered long without fading.

Karaweik and A Cui ran eagerly ahead to retrieve the catch. Luo Dahai followed with a pleased and rather self-satisfied air. Only Sima Hui lagged behind, his shoulder wound heavy and his head feeling dull and foggy. Even the six or seven catties of the rifle onF his back felt unbearably heavy, and he was shuffling along step by step at the rear. Then he suddenly sensed something was wrong behind him. He was just about to turn around to see what it was when a cold gun barrel was pressed against the back of his head.

(Note: “Kokang” in the text refers to the Burmese word for “Chinese person.”)