Caves in My Hometown

As we know, caves were sanctuary to humankind in remote ages. I always have a special feeling of caves, not because of their grand surprisingly formed structure or the shining stalactites they have, but the memories of them in my childhood.

When I was very young, I was energetic like any other kid around me and had lots of time to waste. Life seems careless and everything looks like in a static state. With my buddies, we spent time together to dig holes, to build grass houses, to climb trees, and on and on. One of the most interesting and excited things we did together was to explore caves.

Back then, my hometown was sleepy, peaceful and sunny. People were easy going and nice to each other. The town was its own universe; the life was simple for all the folks. People would love to take breaks under some oak tree in a warm summer afternoon, chatting, playing chess, etc. were like routines. There were three caves in my hometown I had known, they were named the Baby Cave, the Water Cave, and the Black Cave. There were diverse from one to another. Me and buddies had explored some of them in those sunny, simple days.

The trigger to explore the caves was the curiosity. A buddy named Dayinzui, a guy we all liked him, was a funny and a decent friend. We kids were excited when he told us there were caves in our town, the excited feeling made us to explore the caves. But one of the caves we actually didn’t explore, because of the horrible story it has, it is the Baby Cave.

The Baby Cave

The Baby Cave is Located on the cliff of the west front of the mighty Mont Sanzenmen——it literally means three family members in the Bai language, due to the shape of the mountain looks like three family members and one of them is a child cradling in their parents’ warm arms, so it got the name. The location of the cave can be seen easily from any angle at the foot of the mountain. The cave is made up of stone; the entrance is like a cubic tube, and there’s no door at the entrance, so people can peek into the cave far away from it. We never got into the cave for the reason of the fearful story I mentioned above.

According to old people of my village, there was a woman who had pregnant, one day she was impulsed to leave the village, maybe because she was not married or some other secret reason I don’t remember at all. The poor woman had no choice, under the intense pressure of the society she climbed on the mountain and finally entered to the cave.

People didn’t know what had happened after she left the village. Some strange things happened at some day. One night, a villager came down from the mountain to get home after a hard day of working. When he just went through the location of the cave though he was far away from the cave, he heard some voice from the direction of the cave. At the beginning, he thought there was some wild cat meowing, but when he stopped walking, and carefully hearing the voice, it was clearly some child was crying. He looked around; the sunlight was already gone, dark was the theme, the things visible were merely a few feet away. The villager thought in a second, why and where there was a child crying as it was so late, who the hell on the mountain with a baby in a such dark night? It shocked him when he remembered the poor pregnant woman a couple days ago. The thought crawling violently in his mind. The crying was going on, the steps of the villager became lighter, the sound of walking disappear, the night got colder and the crying became louder. The villager almost could hear a needle drop on the floor when the baby crying voiced once stopped. He thought the poor woman was going to take revenge, she would kill all the people who had pushed her on the verge of death, the voice was made by her ghost baby. He almost fallen down on the ground and circling down to the bottom of a mountain valley on the mountain route if he didn’t grasp some branch of a tree. With the baby crying voice started again, the villager stumbled down to the foot of the mountain. Now, the voice had gone, and he felt safe.

The community seems as normal as usual. People chat under the oak tree near an old well in the thick darkness, kids were running around and laughing, it seems the laughters could kill any evil spirit. The night breeze touched the trees around the village road, lights of candle waving back and forth from windows of some houses.

When the first light of the sun came to the town, it was another new normal day. The villager got sick. He told people what had happened last night, but people didn’t believe him, they said to him it was he who scared himself. When he regained health, he continued telling that what he said was real. A few days later, some young people met him and they told him that they were going to check it out because there was nothing to do whatsoever, but this time they would get to the cave under the sun. A few hours later, those young people came back with frightened faces, they told people what they saw.

The poor woman was not there, there were some bones and a skull on the floor of the cave, the bones and the skull seems they were not belonged to an adult. People in the village believed that it was very clear that the poor woman ate her baby in a very hungry cold day after just the baby born, so the baby became a ghost lingering around the cave, crying in the continuous days.

All kids in the village knew the scary story. When each time an adult person told the story I was scared at the bottom of my heart. People kept telling the story for generations until one day the story was never mentioned again. But each time when I look at the mountain in my hometown, the story surged into my mind as if I was the villager at that night.

The Water Cave

It was a sunny day, we kids packed some stuff: a couple of candles, flashlights, some niuniuta(a snack of fried bread with red sugar on it), and a match. I don’t remember who the buddies were, but me, Dayinzui, Huizan and Dewei were there. Dayinzui said his class organized an activity to explore the Water Cave, it was really fun. As kids, we were excited about those adventure activities.

The water cave is located on the belt of a mountain in GaoXin village. It is a cave with a stream flowing out of it. The shining sun was in the middle of the sky when we got there. The stingy sunlight suffused on my body, it made me to get into the Water Cave for some cold air. Dayinzui told us the cave was there behind the shrine. The stream of the cave was about 2 meters in width, it flows under the shrine, poured down to a mountain valley. The water was clean to drink.

People can’t find the cave if they don’t look around the shrine carefully. The entrance of the cave covered with mexia(Bai language, a grass). We lined up and walked into the cave. The coldness stretched out from my feet to all of my body as I my feet touched it. The cave got darker when we get into deeper, so we turned on our flashlights, we don’t know the length of the cave. There was no other sound in the cave except the stream, it got quieter and quieter. Finally, we couldn’t see the light of the entrance. We found a sock on the wall of the cave, the color of the color is flesh like but degraded, it must have been burying into the soil and dipping into the water for a very long time. We didn’t know who left it here, might be someone who had got into here before, and scared out of guts and ran out, left the sock in a hurry running. Until now, I think the Water Cave was dug by people not made by nature, as the cave is like an arch and the cave wall is made up of soil not stone, and the soil was not solid enough to support the cave millions of years. And The reason why people dug the cave is to get the water in the mountain to farm the lands at the valley.

We got into the cave for two times. The first time we didn’t make it to the bottom of the cave for the sake of scary of ghosts and some other invisible spirits. On the second time, we made it. The bottom is also consisted of soil and the water flowing out beneath it. The water was about ten inches deep; we didn’t know where the water really came from.

The Water Cave was not what I expected. I thought the Water Cave should look like the cave in the TV series Journey to the West, it should have a fall barriers people to enter, and stalactites was the basic feature, but none.

The Black Cave

The Black Cave is on the right top of the Water Cave. It is located in the mountain chest. We followed Dayinzui to find the cave.

When we finally got to the cave, we could see the whole view of the mountain valley. We were on the serpentine mountain route in front of the cave, the mountain valley below was deep and luxuriant. It covered with arbors, horse grass, and some other unknown greenish bushes. The green view and the smell of nature made my mind refreshing.

The Black Cave has a sort of chamber, it was used as a goat house, filled with goat waste; the smell was really strong. The walls and the ceiling were made up of cave stones, the floor was piled with loosen soft dry soil. Dayinzui told us, the entrance of the cave was very small and difficult to find. After a few minutes, we finally found the entrance, part of the entrance is on the ground. The entrance only allows a person through at a time, maybe an adult couldn’t pass it. When we made into the cave, we were acknowledged that we should light the candles up and turn off the flashlights for the reason that candles could test oxygen level in the cave and save some power for emergency use; if the candles burn well it indicates the oxygen level is good for humans. We did what we were told.

Dayinzui was the guy who guided us at the beginning. The beginning of the cave is narrow, the air in the cave was a little of cold and stale. The ceiling is also low; we bent our body to forward. Several minutes later, we found there were many bats on the ceiling. I thought the bats were like a small mouse with wings on their shoulder; they looked angry when we put our candles to inspect details of the bats view. In some areas, the cave ceiling is very high, we can jump up and down, but at certain areas, we must crawl to go through.

As the time went by, we found we were circling in the cave; we didn’t think we were forwarding; we lost in the cave. We wanted to get out but could not find the entrance. We marked the wall with crossing marks by using stone, in this way we could tell if we had been specific areas.

In the process of figuring out where the entrance was, a super deep hole appeared in front of us; the hole is about 2 meters in diameter. We turned on the flashlights we could not see the bottom of the hole. We tossed rocks in the hole to calculate the depth, but we didn’t hear the sound of rocks crush on to the bottom. We all agreed it was dangerous, we should be very careful. We stepped on the edge of the hole, grasp some stone of the cave wall, one person after another, finally we all crossed the hole.

We also found bones buried in the soil, we didn’t know what kind of creature the bones belong to. It might belong to wolves, this thought scared all of us; if we could not get out of the cave, the wolves will eat all of us alive. Or, the bones belong to goats or primitive human beings; we didn’t care.

When we finally see the sunlight of the entrance, we relaxed, the outer bright world was so lovely.

I don’t know how many caves in my hometown and where are they all located. Before the cave exploration I didn’t know there were caves in my hometown. The Black Cave is the first decent cave I had entered. The interior structure is much similar to the scenes on the television compares to the Baby Cave and the Water Cave. I wish in the future I would have a chance to explore some other caves in my hometown if there are any.

Afterthoughts

Throughout the years, my hometown has dramatically changed. Many of the familiar things in childhood have disappeared. New people come in and locals get out. Once the sleepy town becomes polarization, one is the prosperous of tourism near the lake, the other is the local culture influence gradually is going down the hill. The indispensable culture elements like stories, rituals, and activities in daily life in old days lost their position in the competition of economic development.

The caves mean a lot to me; they gave me unprecedented experience, let me know the power of the nature. Caves once were the most important shelter back in the stone ages, from where the human civilization evolved rapidly. The arts in the caves we saw today tell us that the caves were cradles of all kinds of civilizations. We should thank the nature for creating habitable caves for protecting us from the wild, gave us human beings a warm place to live.

Those cave explorations are living in the deep neural networks of my brain. I can call them up to show me what happened in the past of my life. Every piece of memory is like an image slides from the left side to the right of a screen. I think what makes humankind special is the ability we can communicate to our brain to extract the specific data that we need, and to build a model or pattern to predict the future or use it as a tool to sense the nearby surroundings. I am astonished by so much memory we human beings can store through a life. We stored the good feelings, bad experience, excited moments, depressed emotions; all these memories made us who we are.

From cavemen to the dominant specie on Earth, in such a short of time, human beings overcome uncountable difficulties, the future of the Homo Sapiens is glorious. With the development of A.I, there will be one day humankind could upload brains to the network cloud, or upload our memories and consciousness to robots. When that come true, the special characteristics of human beings will be gone; the boundary of secrets between humans will disappear too. The personal secrets may will also be priced on the market in the future, how do we prevent this happen?