Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 3 Chapter 8: The Giant Rift Valley

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa, Volume 3 Chapter 8: The Giant Rift Valley

Under the ferocious assault of successive gusts of wind and rain, within Wild Man Mountain “the heavens collapsed and the earth crumbled, peaks shook and mountains trembled.” That “Mosquito Special Transport Plane,” along with the collapsing rock strata, plummeted downward at high speed with a howling sound. Inside the jolting and tumbling cabin, Sima Hui saw nothing but pitch blackness outside the cockpit window. He felt the world spinning around him, his head swimming with dizziness, his ears filled with the humming sound of wind. Yet for a long time there was no impact explosion at the bottom. All around was only dense black fog, completely destroying any sense of space and direction, as if he had fallen into a bottomless abyss.

In the midst of chaos, somehow he touched a switch. On the instrument panel of the cockpit, a red light suddenly lit up. Sima Hui saw the light flickering uncertainly, and a thought suddenly stirred in his heart. He remembered this light seemed to be some kind of alarm signal, something that should only flash when the plane was out of control or about to crash. He secretly groaned in his heart. The fog within the Wild Man Mountain giant rift valley was unfathomably deep. Given the vastness of heaven and earth, the boundlessness of creation, who knew when this transport plane would finally hit the ground? Now he was afraid he could not even die a quick and clean death.

The Black Snake special transport plane was falling at high speed. Before it had crashed into the ground and killed everyone aboard, the fuselage suddenly leveled out. It turned out that while the upper portion of the giant rift valley had an irregular, almost completely vertical cliff face, the bottom contained an even more vast and profound space. The rift valley was narrow at the mouth and wide in the belly, its cavern cross-section shaped like a “pyramid,” growing wider the deeper it went. Moreover, the terrain here was unique. Geothermal energy rose from below, with strong thermal convection currents swirling upward, naturally supporting this transport plane and abruptly slowing its descent.

The all plywood structure of the Mosquito special transport plane, historically known as the “wooden miracle,” demonstrated tremendous advantages in this special environment approximating a “chimney effect.” It was like a kite with a broken string, flipping several somersaults in the air, before finally crashing crookedly into a patch of mud. The left wing of the transport plane completely broke off upon impact, and the propellers on the engine were all shattered. The tilted fuselage, driven by inertia, slid obliquely for over a hundred meters before finally stopping.

In the cockpit, Sima Hui felt his three souls and seven spirits had all been shaken out of their shell. With great difficulty he finally returned them to their proper place. There was not a single place in his four limbs and hundred bones that did not ache. In his dazed consciousness, he realized this transport plane had finally landed. It seemed his fate was not yet sealed. Falling from a height of a thousand meters, he had not been smashed into pieces on the spot. This could completely be called a miracle. But his situation was still unclear, and he did not want to use phrases like “after surviving great disaster, good fortune will follow” to deceive himself. He could only sigh with involuntary admiration: “It seems the mosquito aircraft manufactured by the British truly live up to their reputation. Their survival rate is indeed extraordinarily high.”

Sima Hui struggled to prop himself up, fished out the searchlight from his person, and shone it around. His eyes had been shaken into double vision. Everything he saw had overlapping images, vague and blurry. He saw that the others were more or less intact. Fortunately, the cabin facilities were in good order, and everyone had been strapped in with safety belts. Head injuries and bleeding were unavoidable, but what was worth rejoicing was that at least no one had broken arms or legs. The most severely injured was Karaweik. During the jolting, a gash had been opened on his head, blood flowing down his entire face. A Cui beside him was helping bandage it. Luo Dahai and the Russian White Bear had both been bruised and battered from their respective falls, but were not seriously harmed. They were merely dizzy and disoriented, lying in the cabin unable to recover for quite some time.

Sima Hui also shone the focused flashlight at Yu Feiyan. Although Yu Feiyan’s face was pale, she waved her hand to indicate she was fine. Once their dizziness slightly subsided, the two looked out of the cockpit. They saw nothing but pitch darkness everywhere, except for a faint, flickering thin line above their heads. Presumably this was the giant ground fissure at the outer edge of the Wild Man Mountain rift valley, appearing and disappearing amidst the lightning and thunder. But looking up from here, that extraordinarily wide rift valley gap was actually as thin as a strand of hair. It was truly difficult to imagine just how deep underground they were.

Yu Feiyan was secretly astonished in her heart. She had not expected the vertical descent of the cavern interior within the rift valley to be so deep. If there were no other exits nearby leading outside the mountain, then this unfathomably deep underground space, together with the impossibly high fissure above their heads, would become an insurmountable “nightmare” for the expedition team. She made a gesture, telling Sima Hui to go outside the cabin and see what the situation was.

Sima Hui’s body had nearly been shaken apart, the pain making him suck in several breaths of cold air. He had no choice but to forcefully push open the cockpit canopy above him. Suddenly, he had the feeling of having been reborn into a different world. Only then did he realize that the dense fog covering the depths of the cavern had all dissipated. Only the large amounts of accumulated water in the strata were seeping and dripping everywhere, forming boundless fine rain that floated and scattered down continuously. He deduced that this was probably because the collapse area at the rift valley edge was too large, changing the air circulation underground. Additionally, the violent wind and rain had rapidly increased the accumulated water within the mountain rock strata, surging into the depths of the giant rift valley. The sky above was pouring down sudden rain, and this underground cavern was also following suit with its own rainfall. That was why the boundless fog had been suppressed. It seemed that before the tropical storm “Pagoda” passed through, the extraordinarily dense fog would not reappear for the time being.

Yu Feiyan was eager to determine where they were, so she took out a signal flare from Sima Hui’s backpack and fired one to each side from within the cockpit. Two ghastly bright signal flares traced long parabolic arcs toward the distance. Because there was no dense fog obscuring the area nearby, they could use the pale green light to faintly see that the distance from the bottom of the underground cavern to the top of the rift valley could not be determined in reality. Based purely on feeling and estimation, the vertical height had to exceed a thousand meters. The inner walls of the pyramid-shaped cavern were all inverted slopes, perilously steep, with no areas where people could climb or ascend. Even Sima Hui, skilled in performing the “Scorpion’s Backward Wall Climbing” technique, could do nothing. This seemed to be a natural trap. Once you entered, you could forget about leaving. For victims who fell here, it was truly “separated from the earth without sharp claws, wishing to fly to the sky but lacking wings.” The bottom of the Wild Man Mountain giant rift valley had gentle terrain, vast and boundless in all directions, all swampland formed by seeping groundwater. In the deeper distance, there was still lingering hazy fog, mist obscuring the distant waters, fog locking the deep mountains, making it impossible to see clearly. This area at the bottom of the cavern should originally have been an underground lake located at the deepest part of Wild Man Mountain. But the mountain vegetation was so dense that most of the accumulated water had no time to seep into the strata before being absorbed by the plant roots in the jungle, causing the entire underground lake to become a semi-dried mud swamp. Added to this, over thousands of years, various plants and soil layers washed down from the top of the rift valley by wind and rain gradually accumulated in the center of the mud swamp, forming a continuous dike. The wetland surface was covered with a thick layer of green moss, with occasional weak phosphorescent flashes from decaying matter. Looking out from the horizontal line, it rose and fell in uneven succession, indistinguishable from wild grass.

This vast and profound underground cavern in northern Myanmar’s Wild Man Mountain had always been a secret realm that people could hardly penetrate. Although Sima Hui and the others had entered the interior of the rift valley alive, and had taken advantage of the fog’s disappearance to use the light from illumination signal flares to roughly see the topographical contours of their surroundings, they did not feel enlightened in their hearts. Instead, they all involuntarily felt a sense of uneasy premonition: “What our eyes can see now is only the tip of the iceberg. Who knows how many more world-shaking secrets remain hidden in this sunless underground world.”

Yu Feiyan had keen eyes and ears. When the signal flares on the illumination rounds streaked across the sky, she discovered that in the wetland swamps around them, there seemed to be something rapidly crawling around the perimeter of the transport plane. But the movement speed was too fast. Before she could clearly see what it was, it had already vanished from sight. She pondered: “In dim swamp areas, there are likely hidden aggressive creatures like crocodiles and Burmese pythons. rashly leaving the cabin would not be prudent.”

So she changed her mind, warning everyone to pay attention to the surrounding movements and not to leave this Mosquito transport plane for the time being. After speaking, she threw three more signal flares outside the cabin, illuminating the nearby field of fire, and pulled back the bolt on her “Uzi” submachine gun, chambering a round to guard against sudden unexpected events.

Sima Hui saw that after the illumination flares extinguished, the light from the few signal flares near the Mosquito transport plane appeared as faint as fireflies in the deep underground cavern. The surroundings sank once again into boundless depth and silence. He had previously guessed countless times what might exist in the fog-covered rift valley, but never found any clue. Now being within it, he felt even more strongly that the Wild Man Mountain giant rift valley was extraordinarily sinister and strange. Across vast and smoke-like stretches of time, it had endured countless years of wind and rain carving. It had always been a blind spot beyond human cognitive reach. And within this empty darkness, there must be hidden some mystery difficult to reveal. The more he thought about it, the more complex it became, his thoughts sinking deeply into it, inevitably becoming somewhat distracted. For quite a while he did not speak again.

Yu Feiyan found it somewhat unexpected that Sima Hui could have moments of speechlessness. She handed her own pistol to him, reminding him to carefully observe the situation around the transport plane. Then she bent down to go to the rear of the cabin, examining the cargo loaded in this “Mosquito Special Transport Plane” one by one, searching for the item commissioned by the client. Once obtained, they should immediately find a way to locate an exit and find a path to evacuate “Wild Man Mountain.” The expedition team’s thirty-some members had by now been reduced to six survivors, who had fallen together with this missing transport plane into the deepest part of the Wild Man Mountain giant rift valley. But setting aside those inexplicable and bizarre encounters along the way, the progress of events was still somewhat unexpected. First, they had not expected to find the “Black Snake” transport plane at the first opportunity. Second, the invasion of the tropical storm had greatly weakened the dense fog surging from underground. And most importantly, the “cargo” in the cabin was still there.

This modified Mosquito special transport plane, produced during World War II, belonged to the medium aircraft category. The not particularly spacious cabin was divided into front, middle, and rear sections, completely connected internally without any partitions. The foremost section was the cockpit, while the middle and rear sections could carry personnel and supplies that needed air force transport.

At the rear of the “Black Snake” cabin, four rectangular sealed wooden crates were tightly bound, covered with heavy waterproof canvas. Two formed a group, locked very securely. During the violent jolting and impact just now, they showed no signs of loosening or scattering. But aside from some numerical codes, there were no other markings on the crates.

Yu Feiyan first had A Cui hold the searchlight to help illuminate inside the cabin, then ordered the Russian White Bear to use a duckbill pike to pry open the lids of the wooden cargo crates. Just as they were about to act, they faintly heard someone speaking from a dark corner within the cabin. Sima Hui heard that although the voice was weak, it was close by, right behind him. The radio in the transport plane’s cockpit had been completely damaged and could no longer receive any communication signals. The condition inside the cargo crates could not be seen for the moment, but they were equally sealed with precision. Even if there were truly a living person hidden inside, they would have suffocated to death by now. Moreover, judging by the direction of the sound’s source, it should have come from the middle cabin where Luo Dahai and the others were. The expedition team had only these few survivors remaining. Apart from the half-mute Russian White Bear, Sima Hui naturally knew exactly what everyone else’s voices sounded like. But the sound that had just come out was extraordinarily strange, clearly belonging to someone else. Sima Hui was sharply alert: “There are other people in this Mosquito transport plane!”

But when he pricked up his ears to listen again, he could hear nothing more.

Sima Hui thought it might be because his nerves were tense, causing him to produce some kind of auditory illusion. He turned to ask Yu Feiyan, who was closest to him: “Did you hear something just now?”

Yu Feiyan had also detected something unusual. Having often dealt with European and American clients, she could tell that the speaker just now had a distinct British accent. She said to Sima Hui: “It seemed to be a British person. He said the cargo loaded in this cabin… is very dangerous.”

The abyss-like underground cavern was originally dim and pitch black. Inside the cramped, leaking cabin there was only one searchlight. Although the people were close together, they could not even see each other’s faces and figures clearly. But precisely because the space was narrow and the distance extremely close, the living presence of people could still be mutually sensed. Sima Hui could confirm that including himself, there were only six people in the cabin. How could there suddenly be an extra person? Unless the British person Yu Feiyan referred to… was the “ghost” of a British Royal Air Force pilot.