Top of the barren mountain.
I heard a construction worker say he had dug something up, so I quickly went over and asked, "What did you dig up? Is it blue clay?"
"No, when I was shoveling the shovel just now, I felt resistance, but if I used a little force, I could push the shovel down again. It felt like I dug up something like ceramics."
The earthworker shone his headlamp on the soil, stirred it with a Luoyang shovel, and picked out a fragment, handing it to me: "Boss, you chose the perfect spot. There's a fragment in the soil. Are we not going to drive the test hole directly into the tomb?"
I looked at the pottery shards in my hand and pointed to the Luoyang shovel in the earthworker's hand: "How many meters did you dig down?"
The earthworker glanced at the scale on the shovel handle: "Thirteen and a half meters, less than fourteen meters."
I continued, "When you discovered the tomb raider's hole on the next mountain, did you measure its depth?"
Sixteen meters!
The earthworker responded, "With our skill level, we can only dig this deep at most. To dig any deeper, we'd have to use power tools! I've heard that experts in the field can use a Luoyang shovel to reach a depth of forty meters, and they can even dig wells by hand. I don't know how they do it!"
I learned that there was still a three-meter gap between the probe hole I was drilling and the hole on the neighboring hill, so I handed him a cigarette: "Rest for five minutes, then drill down two meters and see if you can find the blue clay."
Alright!
The earthworker agreed and then started stretching his arms, preparing for the next task.
While the workers were resting, I squatted down and turned on my flashlight to examine the pottery shards they had dug up.
Seeing the shards scattered all over the ground, Jiang Man squatted down beside me and said, "When we went to see Song Laosan before, we checked the soil in the valley very carefully and didn't find any pottery shards. But we dug something up here. Is it possible that we've found the right place?"
Something's not right.
I shook my head and said, "Western Zhou pottery is still mainly composed of clay-based gray pottery and sand-tempered gray pottery, as well as sand-tempered red pottery and clay-based red pottery. Clay-based black pottery was still found in the early Western Zhou period, but it disappeared in the late Western Zhou period. These pottery fragments are clay-based black pottery, but the large and thick-walled pieces should have been made using the coil-building method. Therefore, they should be products of the Eastern Zhou period, that is, the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, which fits the era when blue clay was used in tombs."
However, these pottery pieces have no decorations and are rather crudely made, unlike what one would expect from burial goods. Furthermore, even if they were burial goods, the clay should have been unearthed first, and then the pottery fragments should have been discovered.
"I'm getting more and more confused. Pottery can't be formed naturally; it must have been created by humans. If this thing wasn't a burial object, and you think there's more clay underneath, then why would it be in the soil?"
Jiang Man thought for a moment: "Do you think it's possible that this pottery was a container for transporting blue clay? Blue clay is naturally formed and not found everywhere. Regardless of the motives of the people who placed the blue clay in the mountains, they would have needed a container to transport it there, right?"
I curled my lip: "The mountain we were on before, they dug up blue clay at both the top and the bottom. That must have been a huge project. If they used earthenware urns to transport it, how many pottery urns would that have used up?"
Jiang Man shrugged and said, "No matter the dynasty, the cheapest machines are always for the poor! Especially in ancient feudal society, there was no difference between people and livestock. Anything that could be solved by manpower, whether it was firing pottery or transporting clay, anything that seems unbelievable to us now, could be solved in the simplest way back then. Slaves had no human rights."
I stubbed out my cigarette on a shard of pottery on the ground and waved to the two earthworkers: "It's about time, let's get to work. We still have several places to explore tonight."
When I spoke, the two earthworkers worked together. One of them used a Luoyang shovel to drill a exploratory hole, while the other helped assemble the shovel handle.
With the shovel handle assembled, the earthmover began rotating the shovel head to dig downwards.
The most difficult part of this deep pit, which is more than ten meters deep, is not digging the soil, but removing it.
The Luoyang shovel has a shovel head that is only 20 centimeters long. Once the shovel head is full, the shovel handle, which is more than 10 meters long, has to be lifted up to empty the soil from the shovel head before it can be lowered down again.
After about half an hour of this, the Luoyang shovel went down another meter. The shovelman picked up the Luoyang shovel, turned it around once, and suddenly stopped: "Boss, we've hit the jackpot."
"Push the shovel down harder and see what you can bring up."
Hearing what the earthworker said, my heart also jumped.
According to my original idea, the structure at the bottom of this mountain should be a layer of stone to prevent the blue clay from seeping in, and there should be a layer of rammed earth on top to prevent moisture evaporation, and then the blue clay should be poured in.
But we haven't even seen the mud layer yet, and the earthworkers have already dug up something hard. Three possibilities flashed through my mind.
First, we might have dug in the wrong location and the earthworkers hit rocks. If that's the case, then the entire exploratory borehole would be wasted, and we'd have to waste several hours digging a new one.
The second possibility is that the builders placed a layer of stone on top of the clay to prevent it from absorbing moisture from the soil. This would mean that among the team that dug the tunnel on that mountain, there was a feng shui expert who was particularly knowledgeable about the tomb's structure.
As for the third possibility, it is that there is no green clay in this mountain, which completely overturns my previous theories.
I had the earthmovers work harder so that we could use the debris brought up by the Luoyang shovel to verify which method we were encountering.
Upon hearing my instructions, the earthworker had his companions help lift the shovel handle about half a meter, and then slammed it down.
At that moment, I was also worried about what was below, so I focused my attention on the two people's hands.
As the Luoyang shovel fell, the earthworker's body visibly swayed. The Luoyang shovel, which had only been lifted half a meter, now fell at least a meter deep.
"The kiln collapsed?"
The earthworker felt the Luoyang shovel sink, a look of doubt flashing in his eyes. He then pushed the Luoyang shovel down a little further and said to me, "Boss, there's a gap underground. I thought we'd dug into a tomb, but now it seems the gap is only half a meter deep."
After hearing the geotechnical worker's explanation, I analyzed the situation underground: "Given the short distance of the fall, and considering the previous unearthed objects, it's likely that it smashed something like a pottery jar. Let's bring up the Luoyang shovel and take a look."
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