Chapter 5.18 Salty (Extra)

We set up a radio antenna at the entrance so we knew where to come back to, and then turned on our walkie-talkies to test the noise frequency. After that, we braved the strong wind and started looking for the lake.

I still couldn’t understand what was going on in this huge underground cave and I couldn’t figure out what the geological structure was like. From the old man’s account, this underground area should be a huge underground lake. There was an artificially built stone wall in the center of this lake that divided it into two. But after we came down, we found the materials for building the stone wall, but didn’t see any signs of the lake.

Is this salt source the bottom of the original underground lake? I asked myself. Did the lake dry up? When I came out of the tunnel just now, I thought I had heard the sound of flowing water, but I later found that it was just the friction of the salt particles scraping across the salt field.

After taking a few steps, Lei Benchang seemed confused and was glancing around with a blank look on his face. Fatty patted him and told him to calm down.

“Where are we now?” I asked Fatty. He was more clear-headed than me when it came to climbing up and down like this. He told me that we should be in the mountain now. After we had encountered the place where the bronze pipe entered the rock stratum, the slope didn’t angle down as much and seemed to level out more. He figured we were going straight into the mountain rather than walking towards the bottom like we had expected, which actually made sense.

“Let’s do some calculations,” Fatty said. “We shouldn’t walk around blindly.” He used his feet to wipe away the loose salt particles under our feet and revealed the hard salt surface underneath. He pulled out his rock pick and started scratching a picture on the salty ground.

“What’s the underground water system normally like? First, there are numerous pools in these mountains. The water comes from the mountains and flows in all directions. Water is the same no matter what. It always moves from high to low ground. The water on top of Mt. Wuyi flows downward in all directions, and those streams accumulate into pools. But the water in these pools has to go underground, so what does it do? It seeps into the cracks in the rock and slowly penetrates down. When it encounters underground caves, it starts to drip and converge. This forms countless pools which in turn form underground streams. These streams then converge and become underground rivers or lakes.”

When I nodded, he continued: “But based on this principle, the number of fish in these deep pools would be depleted one day. But there’s an endless amount of fish in these deep pools, so where are they coming from? The ancients had a legend that stated the centers of these kinds of pools were connected to springs or the Dragon Palace (1). In modern times, some people have a more scientific explanation: these deep pools are connected to underground rivers. But the question is how? There has to be a big hole at the bottom of the pool with the underground river below it. All the water in the pool flows into the underground river, which is why most people think that it’s wrong for an underground water system to be above the pool and below the river. But most of the time, the underground river isn’t located below the deep pool. It’s inside the mountain on the other side of the pool. The two have the same water level, so it’s reasonable to believe that there’s a connecting hole under the water.”

I continue to nod. My family had the orange-covered 1962 version of “One Hundred Thousand Whys”, which also said this. As long as there was any conclusion, Mao Zedong’s quotes would be written on the side.

“There’s also another possibility. It’s a kind of tributary,” Fatty said. “The deep pool we saw is like a sub-lake and there’s a mother lake inside the mountain that’s at the same height. We can’t see it, but there are channels connecting them below the water level. There are dry tunnels above the mother lake’s water level that connect to the dry tunnels in the underground river. They are also above the water level. It’s only when the underground lake is at high tide that the underground river’s water level rises above the norm. As a result, these dry tunnels would be submerged, and both the fish and water would transfer to the mother lake. Like that, the fish could then swim from the mother lake to the sub-lake.”

From a logical standpoint, these two situations were actually the same. And it also applied if you replaced the underground rivers with underground lakes. Based on the trend and logic, it was correct to assume that the ancient bronze fish ladder extended all the way into the mountain and that we had really reached the underground lake basin. Since we hadn’t seen the deep pool, it should be somewhere close to the edge of the cave.

If the underground lake had dried up, then some geological changes must have taken place. If so, then the fish that the old man wanted to catch must have died long ago or turned into a giant salted fish.

“This should be the right fucking spot. Where’s the lake?” Fatty scratched his head, dislodging a lot of salt particles.

I lit a cigarette and took a puff, but found that it was all salty. After looking down at Fatty’s picture, I frowned: “Wait, where’s the wind coming from?”

There was no wind in an enclosed cave, but the airflow was surging here so there had to be a lot of places where it was coming from. This was in line with Fatty’s second theory that it was a kind of tributary. There could be a lot of dry tunnels above this huge salt cave that were connected to caves and tunnels throughout the whole mountain. The wind could be coming in through these tunnels, which was why it was so chaotic. It fit perfectly with the theory.

As I walked several laps and continued to explore, the wind and salt quickly dried my lips out and caused them to crack. My eyes and nose also felt like they were full of salt. In Fatty’s words, if we went any further, our lungs would be pickled in no time. But there was still no sign of water.

While we sat on the ground to rest for a bit, I looked out at the salt field and listened to the salt particles that sounded like flowing water. This is simply a sea of salt, I said to myself. If there’s a lake here, does that mean there are fish that can survive in such salty water?

When I thought of this, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration. Was the salty sea—in other words, the lake—under the salt crust beneath our feet? I pressed my ear to the salt field, but couldn’t hear any sounds from below. My actions woke Fatty up. He struck the salt crust with his rock pick, but it was so thick that nothing happened.

<Extra 5.17> <Table of Contents><Extra 5.19>

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TN Notes:

(1) Palace of the Dragon King at the bottom of the Eastern Sea. I figure they’re basically saying all the fish in those pools came from the sea so that’s why they’re never depleted.