The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 30: Sorting Out the Predicament

After the joke was over, Wu Xie started walking and said to the other two: "The most important thing right now is to find out what caused the tragedy here, so starting tomorrow, we'll check all the trucks. What have we got going for us now? Instead of running out of food and water, the people here died when they were trapped and buried by a sandstorm, so there may be a lot of resources in the trucks. These resources might include military grade hardtack that could still be edible in such dry weather, so we'll have to search all the vehicles very carefully and then search each of the corpses for dry food."

Li Cu asked, "How do you know these people didn't die of thirst or starvation? I think if it was a sandstorm, trapping them wasn't the most likely cause of death, but running out of food and water would be."

Wu Xie patted Li Cu on the shoulder: "You are definitely a kid who's lived in the city for too long. Do you know what a sandstorm is?" When Li Cu shook his head, Wu Xie said, "Everything around you isn't air but solid sand, that's what a so-called sandstorm is. Do you understand? It means you suffocate in the end. Suffocation can occur in two situations: one is when a large amount of sand is poured into your nose and mouth, making you unable to breathe. If you don't have a very solid shelter, you'll die miserably. The second is when you're buried in the sand."

"Shou... shou dishi nai!" [1] Li Cu said, but before he had finished speaking, Wu Xie kicked him down from the sand dune: "Speak Chinese."

The next two days were completely tedious as they spent the time sorting through everything. Li Cu was still afraid of the dead at first, but by dusk of the first day, he could already treat the mummies as inanimate objects like Wu Xie did. They even managed to find some hardtack in the trucks, just as Wu Xie had predicted. When they got tired, they ate some of the hardtack and drank water from the haizi, ignoring the quality of their meal since it was more important to save their lives.

They pulled all the bodies out from underneath the trucks, then found a sand dune in the distance and buried them one by one. Later, they found that they didn't have enough manpower to bury the large number of corpses so cleanly and neatly, so they had to throw the bodies down from the sand dunes and watch them slide down the sand, eventually filling the valley with corpses.

By the next afternoon, they roughly estimated that they had already disposed of more than a thousand corpses, and a large number of those had been piled on top of other corpses. Wu Xie decided to erect a tombstone for the dead soldiers, and while contemplating it, Li Cu asked him what name would be better to use on it.

"What should we call it?" Wu Xie wondered. "No matter their reason for coming to this place, they're all dead after all. Respecting the dead is a valued tradition."

"How about 'Monument to the Thousand Martyrs'?" Li Cu asked.

Wang Meng retorted, "Martyr is a glorious title, but it always makes people uncomfortable. It's better to give it a name with a cultured feeling."

Wu Xie looked at him: "Cultured feeling... do you even know what that is?" Wang Meng scratched his head and smiled.

Li Cu continued, "Let's call it 'Parting in Sorrow'. People who leave their loved ones and their homes can never go back, so what kind of sadness is it in the end? Empty sorrow, of course."

Wu Xie nodded: "You're indeed a good flower of the motherland. Yes, let's erect this monument. Can you write these three words?"

"I'm a high school student." Li Cu said angrily. "I'm not like you illiterate people."

They found a metal plate, and Wu Xie engraved the words "Parting in Sorrow" before Wang Meng stuck it in the sand dune. Li Cu found that Wu Xie's handwriting was quite beautiful and realized that he shouldn't call the grave robber illiterate.