Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 3: The Ghost Road Forgotten by the World

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 2: Chapter 3: The Ghost Road Forgotten by the World

Perhaps “bad luck” truly is a kind of fortune that never misses its mark. Just as the small unit decided to flee into the Savage Mountains, A Cui picked up one final piece of news over the radio: a tropical storm system called “Stupa,” having made landfall from the Indian Ocean, was gradually moving north, and its vanguard had already approached the Savage Mountains. Its ferocity and the speed of its advance were the likes of which had rarely been seen in nearly thirty years.

Sima Hui and the others had fought in Burma for many years and had witnessed the catastrophic consequences of tropical storm systems more than once. They understood very clearly what this news meant.

The primeval jungle was riddled with dangers. Beyond the crocodiles and giant pythons, the greater threats came from all manner of venomous snakes and poisonous insects. Moving through the deep mountain forests was also an extremely difficult undertaking, as nearly every step required hacking through with a machete to carve a path. For these reasons, waterways had been the fastest, most practical, and safest route available.

But with the storm system bearing down, mountain floods would inevitably surge, making the web of intersecting rivers and streams impassable, while the low-lying gullies and ravines throughout the mountains would also be subjected to sudden flood surges, becoming extraordinarily dangerous.

The Savage Mountains were not a single peak but a collective name for an entire mountain range. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this had been a region of violent concentrated releases of crustal energy and frequent, intense tectonic activity. As a product of the ancient Himalayan orogeny, it borders the Irrawaddy River to the west, connects to the Gaoligong Mountains to the north, commands the great Pegu Plain to the south, and forms the shape of a sleeping giant stretched across the borderlands shared by Burma, Laos, and China.

The Communist Party of Burma guerrillas were trapped in a narrow strip of land at the boundary between swampland and primeval jungle. Only by pushing north through the Savage Mountains could they get close to the Chinese border. Sima Hui had no map whatsoever. To avoid losing his bearings, he had originally planned to follow the waterways upstream, but the violent storms brought by the tropical system would certainly trigger large-scale flash flooding. Moving against the current would only result in being swallowed by floodwaters, and even if they chose to avoid the waterways and move along the mountain ridges instead, they would face the tremendous danger posed by landslides and mudflows.

With this, even the last faint thread of hope had been extinguished. But Sima Hui also understood very clearly that no matter what, every path led toward death. It was only a question of where that path ended. He turned the matter over in his mind several times and decided that it was still better to die as close to the homeland as possible. He told everyone to pack up as quickly as they could, instructed Luo Dahai to blow up the military radio, and then set out without the slightest hesitation.

Burma is an ancient country with a long history. In modern times it was ruled by British colonizers for nearly a hundred years, and during the Second World War the British, Americans, Chinese, and Japanese had all taken turns fighting across its soil in rapid succession. After finally breaking free from colonialism and winning independence, Burma then erupted into a prolonged civil war.

Back when the Communist Party of Burma was at the height of its power, their stockpiled supplies and weapons had been ample, including mortars, rocket launchers, and tanks, with small arms and ammunition in almost uncountable quantities. Crates upon crates of land mines and grenades were stacked up like small hills. Chinese, American, British, Japanese, Soviet, and German pattern weapons were all represented, and there was even locally manufactured “Burma-made” equipment from local arms factories that could produce copies of British-pattern rifles and pistols. It was practically a museum exhibition of weapons from every nation on earth. But modern weapons were generally lacking, and most of what they had were left over from various earlier wars.

Since the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Kunlong, however, the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Army had been thrown into complete disarray, and the unit’s weapons and ammunition had begun to run dangerously short. Now the four of them had nothing beyond their sidearms for self-defense, two old British-made “Smelly” bolt-action rifles with a small supply of ammunition, and almost no food or medicine whatsoever. Without any map or guide, they plunged headfirst into the boundless primeval jungle of the Savage Mountains.

That day, after crossing two mountain ridges, the terrain gradually descended, and the jungle vegetation grew increasingly dense and lush. It was nearly impossible to find a place to put one’s feet. Walking through it, one could not see the sky by looking up, and without a compass and bearing instrument there was simply no way to determine direction. It was as though they had entered an enclosed natural labyrinth. The four of them had no choice but to constantly hack through layer after layer of hanging vines with their hunting knives to open a path, which slowed their pace considerably.

This vast primeval jungle had a history of one hundred and twenty million years of existence. It lay spread across the low valleys ringed by mountains, breathing quietly and steadily. Covered by nearly a hundred waterways on all sides, the suffocatingly hot and humid climate never changed throughout the year, with neither storms nor sunshine. The dense forest grew a staggering variety of tropical plants, both imaginable and utterly unimaginable, with species numbering in the tens of millions. Within the range of one’s vision, it was nearly impossible to spot two plants of the same species.

The towering ancient trees reached the sky with their branches interlocking overhead, some of them growing as tall as eighty or ninety meters. Because the canopy was so thick, the air inside the dense forest felt particularly gloomy and cold. A faint haze drifted through the jungle, and from time to time giant pythons could be seen coiled in the ancient trees. Venomous snakes and insects of all kinds without names were everywhere, crocodiles appeared from time to time in the dense forest and along the riverbanks, and the water was filled with tadpoles traveling in great swarms, their bodies enormous, and one could only wonder how large they would grow once they became frogs. Even Sima Hui and the others, seasoned veterans of countless battles with nerves of steel, could not help but feel a creeping dread standing inside this dark green corridor of life.

The four of them dared not let their guard down for a single moment, doing their best to avoid every danger they could potentially encounter. But with their eyes saturated in deep green and their minds drifting into confusion, their thoughts became as tangled and intertwined as the roots of the ancient jungle trees around them, and yet in their dazed state a sudden clarity would strike them, making them feel, with sharp and painful vividness, the eternal boundlessness of the natural world set against the brief insignificance of their own lives. This dread that came from somewhere deep within the soul pressed down on them until even breathing felt labored, and their minds grew sluggish, so that they had to stop again and again to get their bearings.

Based on Sima Hui’s experience, continuing this way would make it very easy to get lost. The safest approach was still to find a stream or river to serve as a reference point. They pushed forward a stretch and came upon a wide mountain stream in the dense forest, several meters across, its waters gurgling along in calm and peaceful flow.

The water of this mountain stream was exceptionally clear and transparent. The bottom was covered in colorful pebbles that glittered like brocade, with water plants swaying and the surface shimmering with rippling light.

Sima Hui looked at the surrounding terrain and said: “The shallower parts are relatively safe. Let’s follow this stream upstream for now, and when the storm comes we’ll move to higher ground.”

He had been walking so long in the stifling, humid jungle that his shoulder wound had begun to throb with a dull ache. He could see that it had festered and started to smell, but there was nothing to be done about it without medicine, and even if it rotted he had no way to tend to it. Seeing the cool, clear water of the stream, he went over first, intending to remove the bandage and clean the wound.

But before Sima Hui could get close to the water, Karaweik suddenly lunged forward and grabbed him around the waist from behind, shaking his head frantically at him with an expression of pure terror on his face, shouting something in a torrent of his own language.

Luo Dahai grabbed Karaweik by the scruff of the neck and hauled him off Sima Hui’s back as one might lift a monkey, and snapped: “Sunday, what are you making such a fuss about? You’ve done nothing but cause trouble since you started following us. You’d be better off turning yourself around and going back the way you came. Those soldiers who just surrendered might take one look at you, see how young you are and not even fully grown yet, and just let you walk.”

A Cui sensed something was wrong and quickly stopped Luo Dahai, asking Karaweik in the local language what the matter was. The two of them spoke for quite some time. When A Cui had finished listening, she seemed somewhat perplexed, and told Sima Hui and Luo Dahai: “Sunday says there are water demons in the Savage Mountains. Anyone who drinks the water will not survive.”

Luo Dahai simply assumed Karaweik was warning them the water was poisoned, and was entirely unconvinced: “That’s nonsense. Can’t you see there are live fish in the stream?”

Sima Hui, however, placed a fair degree of trust in what Karaweik had said. He had once followed his “teacher of both civil and martial arts” and learned many skills. Beyond the arts of the forest, he had inherited from his family a set of texts called the “Golden Point Secret Transmission,” commonly known as the “Priceless Gold.” From beginning to end it consisted entirely of mnemonic verses, passed down from master to student by word of mouth and heart, with not a single word ever committed to paper. The “Priceless Gold” was divided into three volumes corresponding to “Heaven, Earth, and Man.” Heaven referred to the innate mastery of the eight trigrams in the palm, Earth covered the geography of mountains and rivers, and Man encompassed the various arts of reading objects and phenomena. This was the very foundation of his ancestors’ rise to prominence, profound and mysterious in its depth, broad in its scope, and regarded as unrivaled under heaven. It had always been passed to sons but not daughters, to family members but not outsiders, giving rise to the saying: “Sooner give up a life than pass on a single line of the Gold.” The final few lines of this set of verses were sufficient to summarize the essence of the whole: “One who can grasp its thread and follow it to its end, who can know the other three corners from one shown, who changes with circumstance in ways no ghost or god can fathom, who once their judgment is set can move freely in any direction, and who has mastered every passage thoroughly, shall surely make their name known across all the seas.”

This gives a sense of its nature.

When Sima Hui had first received the “Golden Point Secret Transmission,” he had been quite young and was still far from fully grasping its subtleties, so he had simply committed it to memory by rote and stamped it into his mind. It was not until he encountered Old Zhao Bie in the ruins of the black house and came to understand that these ancient techniques with their deep and distant origins truly did have some practical use, that he began gradually pondering and studying them. Moreover, in recent years Sima Hui had witnessed many strange and inexplicable things in Burma. This remote and wild land was rife with venomous sorcery, hex-dropping, and other dark practices, and many mysterious phenomena were difficult to explain by ordinary reason.

As the saying goes, “every plant has its root, and every word its reason.” In these deep mountains and vast marshes, strange things were bound to proliferate. Hearing Karaweik, a local native, say that the water of the Savage Mountains could not be drunk, Sima Hui immediately thought of how, when the guerrillas had scattered, so many of them had chosen to walk into gunfire rather than set foot anywhere near this primeval jungle. There was surely some reason for that, and it was probably far more than a simple matter of “water quality.” But what exactly lay behind it, he did not know. Sima Hui knew little about the Savage Mountains, so he asked A Cui to carefully question Karaweik further and get him to be more specific.

But when she did, it turned out that Karaweik himself did not know very much either. It was simply ancient local lore passed down throughout northern Burma that a “mysterious mist” hung over the deep mountain jungles, that it was a dreadful place from which none who entered returned, and that those who died unnatural deaths inside could neither be reincarnated nor attain Buddhahood nor be cast down into the underworld and hell. What awaited them was only eternal nothingness.

The hundreds of rivers and streams that originated in or passed through the Savage Mountains all ultimately flowed down into the great swamps to the south, and no matter how clear the water appeared, no one had ever dared to drink it. For the streams that flowed out from the deep mountain valleys and gorges had been cursed by local natives with sorcery dating back a thousand years, and anyone who came in contact with the water was doomed to an unnatural death, after which their soul would be scattered and destroyed beyond all recovery. Only the morning dew or stagnant water from dead ponds was safe to drink.

Sima Hui felt this was the kind of thing it was better to believe than to dismiss. Only by taking it seriously would they have a chance of living a little longer. He patted Karaweik on the shoulder to signal that he understood. It appeared that the Savage Mountains were indeed a fearful and treacherous place. Besides the terrible weather now approaching, even the streams and rivers were no longer something they could go near.

Their only course now was to move to higher ground rather than lower, and they had no choice but to go back to the mountain ridges to find a way forward. Sima Hui had shouldered his rifle and was about to set off when Karaweik grabbed him again, pointing toward a deep gorge on the other side while rattling off something rapidly, apparently trying to tell Sima Hui that they should go that way.

There was a saying among the people of northern Burma: “There are no people in the People’s Army.” The combat units of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Army had never had many Burmese soldiers. It was the Chinese who numbered in the thousands, which was remarkable in its own right. Still, there were always some locally born people among them, and Sima Hui had spent a long time among the Burmese comrades in the guerrilla unit. Over time he had picked up enough to understand a few words of the most common local dialects and some English. Now, listening to Karaweik, he thought he could make out something about a “road,” and his mind went blank: “Sunday, are you saying there’s a road in that gorge? Are you joking? How could there be a road in a place so deep in the mountains and forests where no one ever goes?”

A Cui told Sima Hui: “What Sunday means is… on the other side of that gorge, there is a ‘Ghost Road.'”

All three of them were now thoroughly puzzled. What was a Ghost Road? Was it for people to walk on, or for ghosts?

Karaweik’s ability to express himself was poor and he could not get his meaning across, growing so frustrated he was scratching his head and ears. Then he seemed to suddenly remember something, and dug through his backpack for a good while before pulling out a battered old notebook, which he handed over for Sima Hui and the others to look at.

Sima Hui took it in his hands and sensed that something was tucked inside the notebook. He opened it casually and found a military uniform sleeve patch embroidered with a tiger’s head on a dark green background, apparently representing the tropical jungle, with a few English letters below it, though these had long since been worn away and were impossible to make out. Beneath the patch was a blurry, yellowed black-and-white photograph showing a group portrait of approximately several hundred soldiers from an entire battalion. With so many people in the frame, they were densely packed and the details were impossible to see clearly.

Then he looked at the contents recorded in the notebook, and found they were written entirely in Chinese characters. After flipping through just a few pages, Sima Hui’s astonishment grew with every line, and at the same time he had already pieced together what Karaweik was trying to tell them. In the most remote and forbidding corner of the Savage Mountains, there genuinely existed a mysterious and hidden “Ghost Road.” It had been constructed jointly by Chinese and American engineer corps during the Second World War: the Stilwell Road. But the notebook also noted that the section known as the “Ghost Road” was connected to many mysterious and unusual events.