curse

Chapter 10

Sitting under the soft light, Bai Bi opened the little book that Jiang He brought out from the drawer.Following the lines copied by Nie Xiaoqing, she read Eliot's "The Wasteland" softly again.

Her voice was very soft, Jiang He once said that he was always fascinated by her voice, listening to her was a wonderful enjoyment.Now, this voice is echoing in Baibi's room, echoing lowly in every corner of the room, on the windows, and on the floor.The handwriting on this paper is indeed very beautiful. Every stroke made of black pen and ink shows an unusual temperament. Words represent a person's temperament, and she always believes in this.She seemed to be able to see Nie Xiaoqing's appearance from these handwriting, her eyes, nose, cheeks, especially her hand holding the pen.Thinking of this, Bai Bi was suddenly disturbed, she didn't want to think about that woman named Nie Xiaoqing anymore, she just copied it once, Bai Bi copied many poems she liked in the past, this is normal.Now, all she can imagine is Eliot, the poet who was born in the United States but became a British citizen and had an unhappy family life. His wife Vivienne spent 11 years in a mental hospital. Only people can write a masterpiece like "The Wasteland".

When she read this paragraph, her shoulders suddenly trembled——

I'm going to show you one thing, it's neither like

Your early shadow steps behind you;
Not like in the evening, standing up to meet you;
I'm going to show you fear in a handful of dust.

Bai Bi seemed to read something between the lines - "Your early shadow, stepping behind you", and - "Fear is in a handful of dust".What does it mean?Maybe it's just the exaggeration of atmosphere and emotion, but in Bai Bi's heart at this moment, it makes her hair stand on end.Is it Eliot's language in poetry?Maybe everyone can't escape the shadow behind them, and also can't escape the fear, because we will all return to dust, and the eternal fear is buried in the dust.But now, even without dust, Bai Bi seems to be able to touch this fear.

She read on—

The wind blows lightly,

Blow me home,
irish child,

where do you stay

I don't know how long it took to finish reading this long poem. She immediately felt a little thirsty in her throat. She drank a glass of water and felt some beads of sweat on her forehead.She looked at the last sentence again - "Nie Xiaoqing gave Jiang He a gift", and not long before Jiang He's accident, maybe she shouldn't have thought about it, but the scene of Jiang He taking over the book still appeared in Bai Bi's mind .Jiang He must have read "The Wasteland" in this book. What did he think when he read "The Wasteland"?Is it fear, or something else?She said to herself, everything is over now, and Bai Bi suddenly asked herself again, is everything over?She doesn't know the answer.

After closing the book, she saw the two words on the back—"curse". What did Jiang He do with these two words?Why is it written at the back of this book?Is it just a coincidence, or does this book symbolize something?She remembered Lin Zisu's words in the archaeological institute today, maybe someone will die, isn't this just a curse?Whose curse, cursed whom?Bai Bi's mind went blank.

Bai Bi recalled the night when Jiang He returned from Xinjiang one month before his accident. Perhaps the seeds of death had already been planted at that time, but he was not like this before going to Xinjiang.Jiang He's eyes reappeared in her mind. Those eyes showed the wilderness in the northwest and the vast desert. She knew that they were going to Lop Nur, and there was a great ancient civilization site in Lop Nur, that is Loulan.

She remembered a night more than 10 years ago, when she was less than 10 years old, Wen Haogu came to her home and had a heated discussion with her father about various topics about Loulan civilization.The mother seemed to be avoiding their discussion, and the little girl Bai Bi was sitting next to them, she couldn't understand what they were talking about at all, only remembering that her father was firmly opposed to going there for archaeological activities again, Bai Zhengqiu's eyes revealed I felt a kind of fear, and that deep fear left a deep impression on Bai Bi's memory.Yes, she finally remembered that her father once said that he had been to the Loulan ruins, and he had been there twice in total, the first time was before Bai Bi was born, the second time was shortly after Bai Bi was born, and the second time was after Bai Bi was born. Went with my mother.

Her father must have left something behind. She remembered that her father had a large stack of materials at home, which he had copied down by himself. In her memory, almost every night, her father would take out these materials and look at them carefully, and then Put it back carefully.Bai Bi stood up and went to another room, where there were some old furniture, including a large bookcase, the door was closed, and there was a lot of dust.Bai Bi never opened this bookcase, perhaps because he didn't want to think about the pain of losing his father.But today, she is determined to open the bookcase.

After opening the bookcase, a strong musty smell made her turn her head away. It took a long time for the smell to dissipate slowly.Bai Bi stretched out her hand cautiously, and took out the contents inside. They were full of thick materials, some handwritten and some printed. There were a lot of them. It took her a long time to put these things on the table.

There were too many, so she flipped through them roughly. The content of these materials ranged from the Paleolithic Age to the Republic of China, including historical research and ancient document transcriptions, as well as copies of archaeological excavation reports and pictures of cultural relics. There are also some records and papers made by the father himself.It will probably take several weeks to read them all.

Fortunately, my father arranged the materials in an orderly manner according to the geographical distribution, so Bai Bi quickly found the materials in Xinjiang.She found that there is quite a lot of information on this part, maybe my father has a special research on the archaeology of the Western Regions.Among the materials about various ancient civilizations in Xinjiang preserved by my father, the part of Loulan is the most.Bai Bi took out this thick part, picked out a few documents at random, and then, the distant Lop Nur and Loulan gradually became clear, like the painting on the wall, spreading before her eyes—— —

Lop Nur is located in the northeast of Ruoqiang County, with an altitude of 780 meters and a remaining area of ​​about 2400-3000 square kilometers, which has been completely dried up.Lop Nur was originally the reservoir of the Kongque River.On the Kongque River delta, Populus euphratica and red willows form forests, and reeds are everywhere, gathering countless wild animals and birds.As early as the Neolithic Age three or four thousand years ago, human settlements had already occurred.Many microlithic cultural sites have been found in the lower delta of the Kongque River and along the coast of Lop Nur.

During the prosperous period of the Han and Jin Dynasties, Loulan Kingdom had thousands of green fields and self-sufficient food; camel caravans flocked on the commercial roads, and the posthouses were often full of tourists; temple bells and drums were melodious, and Buddhist activities were frequent;However, shortly after the ancient country of Loulan experienced its glorious peak, that is, in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, Loulan gradually disappeared from the history books. When Xuanzang passed by this place on his westward journey, he found that it was already a barren desert.In the long history, Loulan has been forgotten in people's memory.

Until more than 1000 years later, in 1900 AD, on March 3, the explorer Sven Hedin from Sweden was exploring in the west of Lop Nur. His Uighur guide Aldik encountered a storm when he returned to the inspection camp to retrieve the lost pickaxe. Lost.But the brave Aldik, relying on the faint moonlight, not only returned to the original camp to touch the lost pickaxe, but also found a pagoda and dense ruins, where there were exquisitely carved wood half buried in the sand, and ancient coins.The ruins discovered by Aldik in the vast night were later excavated and confirmed to be the ancient city of Loulan.The ancient city can be seen again, first of all thanks to the discovery of Aldik.Sven Hedin wrote in his memory: "How lucky it is that Aldik forgot the pickaxe! Otherwise, I would never be able to return to this ancient city. This important discovery that brought new light to the ancient history of Central Asia may not be completed until now. .”

From March 1901th to 3th, 4, Sven Hedin came here again, hired migrant workers to dig randomly in Loulan City, and obtained a large amount of Han five baht coins, exquisite silk fabrics, glassware, weapons, copper and iron from the Han and Jin Dynasties. Tools, bronze mirrors, ornaments, wood carvings in Gandhara style.There are more than 10 Han and Jin wooden slips and paper documents with extremely high historical value; Stein, who came with Sven Hedin, also unearthed a large number of cultural relics in the ancient city of Loulan. There are quite a few documents in the Lu language.A large number of cultural relics, especially paper documents, can be preserved, which is directly related to the local dry climate, just like the treasures from 270 to 349 years ago can be completely preserved in the desert of ancient Egypt.

Bai Bi also found a copy of the papers published by many famous scholars collected by his father. These articles all involved the reasons for the mysterious demise of the Loulan civilization.Bai Bi took a cursory look, and found that there are great differences in various theories. Some people think that the upstream water was cut off and the city was forced to abandon the city; others think that their own fragile environment has been destroyed, and nature has punished human beings. Some people even think that it was the invasion of foreign enemies who destroyed the Loulan civilization by force.In all kinds of legends and speculations, all this seems to have become an eternal mystery.

However, behind the last paragraph about Loulan's demise, Bai Bi saw a line of text written by his father-"They all thought wrong, and Loulan's demise was definitely not due to any of the above reasons."

My father always liked to write down some thoughts and conclusions, but such a bold argument was really rare, because those papers were written by well-known scholars at home and abroad, and they were all authoritative, while her father was just an unknown unknown during his lifetime.

In a stack of papers, Bai Bi saw several copies, which were a special kind of text.There are a total of more than ten pages, each page has dozens of lines, and a few lines of text are incomplete.These characters seem to be linear, neatly arranged horizontally, probably some kind of ancient characters.Looking at these words, Bai Bi felt a sense of déjà vu, her back immediately broke out in sweat, even though she couldn't understand any of the words on the paper.This made her feel even more disturbed. She tried hard to recall the shadows of the words in front of her in her mind, so the words seemed to move and dance in front of her. She seemed to hear the ancient music and the flickering lights in her ears. Thin waist and big eyes.She finally remembered, it was a dream, a dream when she was 10 years old, a woman came to Bai Bi's dream, and wrote a few words on the wall, yes, it was this kind of words, although she couldn't understand , but there is no doubt that the brushwork and lines are of this kind.On the second day after having that dream, her father got into a car accident and separated from her forever, so she will always remember that dream.

At the back of this stack of photocopies is a thesis written by my father. The thesis is not long, but the title is scary.The content of the thesis is very deep, and it is difficult for non-professionals to understand it. She only glanced at it briefly, and then realized that the ancient characters in the copy just now were called "Ka Lu Wen".Khalu script is a very ancient phonetic script, and its alphabet can be traced back to the variant of Aramaic cursive script, the official script of the Achaemenid Dynasty in ancient Persia.This kind of script later became popular in the vast areas of Central Asia as one of the official scripts of the Guishuang Empire in Central Asia.It was originally used to spell the colloquial dialect of the Aryan language in the Indus Valley in the Middle Ages. It was popular in the Peshawar area, where the famous Gandhara civilization, a product of cultural exchanges between the East and the West, was born.Around the end of the second century A.D., the Gandhara civilization and the Kharu language began to spread to the east of the Pamirs, and became the official language of many countries in the Tarim Basin, such as Shule, Khotan, Loulan and Kucha.The kingdoms of Khotan, Shule, and Qiuci soon abandoned this script, and only the Loulan people continued to use the Kulu script until the end of the fourth century AD.

At the end of these materials, Bai Bi found a few black and white photos, which must have been taken by her father. She knew that there was a Seagull flip-up black and white camera at home, and her father often played with this old machine. The photographer was from above Looking at the camera, that is another era.The photos in front of her were taken of the vast wasteland. She looked at the wasteland in the photos. The gravel, gravel, and incomplete mounds were all composed of black and white, monotonous and concise.She thought of the painting on her wall again, and suddenly began to understand why she panicked so much after seeing the painting on the day her father died.The things she dreamed were all things her father had seen and even photographed.There are also a few photos of the ancient Loulan ruins, tall pagodas, houses with only four walls, and tombs in the desert.The more astonishing photo is a row of remains of dead people, all of them are mummies. Although they look blackened and hideous, they are still well preserved. These almost mummified ancient Loulan people are displayed on the ancient wasteland like this In the sun, probably freshly dug up, Dad took pictures of them with his own camera.

However, Bai Bi was very surprised by the last photo. It was not a photo of a ruin, nor was it an ancient human being.It was a woman, a real photo of a young woman, wearing a skirt of an unknown ethnic group, with a very fair complexion, very big eyes, a straight nose, and black hair tied into many small braids.The woman was in her early 20s, standing in the sun, the background was not clear, as if there were trees and houses.There was an indescribable expression on the woman's face, the thin lips, the slightly turned corners of her mouth, and her beautiful chin seemed to be smiling but not smiling.Especially those eyes shining in the sun, they are by no means the eyes of the Han people, those eyes only belong to the ancient and remote Western Regions, they are so mysterious, and there seem to be many ancient mysteries hidden in the eyes.So many years later, when this black and white photo was placed in front of Bai Bi's eyes, she was also fascinated by it.

What surprised Bai Bi even more was that she thought she had seen this young woman, yes, she had indeed seen it, it was in a dream, she seemed to have returned to the dream when she was 10 years old, this woman told her something... A string of words that will never be understood, and also wrote a few words in Kalu language.

It was her, Bai Bi would always remember the face of the young woman in the dream, and now, this face appeared in the old black and white photo in front of him.This was photographed by his father many years ago. Bai Bi doesn't know who this woman is, and may never be able to solve this mystery.

Bai Bi trembled a little, she looked at the woman in the photo quietly, vaguely, she seemed to feel that the person in the photo was talking to her.

She listened intently, but couldn't hear anything except the wind outside the window.

(End of this chapter)