Cassandra's Quest Through the Gorges Chapter 1

It's hard to imagine such a thing, and even harder to imagine experiencing it yourself. But when a woman is thrown into a cell with a man, especially a stranger, she has to face more than just her own grievances and anger.

After the door slammed shut, the cell was completely dark, and nothing could be seen. The floor and walls were covered with slippery moss, and the air was turbid with a strange smell: a faint smell of blood mixed with a strong smell of urine.

She held her arms and tried to lift herself up, but she suddenly held another person's hand, and the two fell together again. This was quite embarrassing. The man kept a polite distance from her as much as possible, but the more two people avoided contact, the easier it was for them to bump into each other. Each collision made them more embarrassed - none of them wanted to be convicted of the crime that terrified them.

She tried not to pull the bound hand, and moved back, touching the cool straw mat in the corner of the room. There was a lot of wet straw underneath, and the edges of the mat were torn. She didn't know how many prisoners had sat here waiting for their fate.

She began to panic - thinking about the way out of these people before, she understood that she had fallen into a predicament that she could not handle alone. She longed to hold her hands with this person who had unexpectedly shared her fate, to speak to him, to ask him all the things that puzzled her. But behind the small window in the door, the guards would stop them at any time.

She could feel the man breathing evenly and having a normal heartbeat, which calmed her down as well. The two of them together are like two halves of a talisman. Because the world is unreasonable, when they are put together, they realize that there is only one reason.

She came here and ended up being arrested. However, if she knew that the entanglement in the past few days would lead to something that she would never be able to figure out in her lifetime, she would never regret this journey through the Three Gorges.

After all, who could reach the world before birth? She only saw the rushing river, blurring the reflections of all the cliffs.

Gift

Unexpectedly, the hovercraft reached Liang County so quickly, in just a few hours.

Another luxury cruise ship sailed down. It seemed that it had just left Liangxian Pier. She pressed close to the glass to look at this place she had heard about for a long time.

This place is called "county", but it is a city of neither size. Like all the towns in the Three Gorges area, it is divided into two distinct layers. The water level of 175 meters above sea level is painted everywhere on the mountains and walls. Above this label is the new city with bright new buildings and oil-painted tiles, pink-blue and light-red glass curtain walls. Below the label is a long expanse of gray and black, which is the old city with a mess of piles and buildings.

This weird-looking double-layered city is like a weird cake that has long since become moldy, but is thickly topped with cream of various colors.

As Cassandra Liu was watching, the gray dock was getting closer and closer, and the spray from the hovercraft soon subsided. After she stepped out of the cabin, she could see the natural topography of the city clearly, which was a little different from other river cities: the old city was on a red sandy beach, flat and slowly spreading out. Behind the old street was a mountain ridge that stretched for hundreds of miles, and the new city was all built on the hillside and along the mountain. From the river, the magnificent buildings were so spectacular that it was eye-catching. In this obvious upper and lower urban area, the warm spring sunshine shone brightly on the upper city, but seemed to be absorbed by the lower city, and the undulating gray was even more shapeless.

On the day when the reservoir stores water, people wake up overnight, and the world will take on a completely new look. Everything that is not new enough will be submerged under the vast river water that cleans everything.

She was a little confused. Was this the lower half of the mountain that her Mother Evelyn saw when she came to Liang County? Would these dirty gray and black buildings have been grayer or more ancient back then? One thing she was sure of: when her Mother Evelyn saw this mountain ridge, she was certainly in a much better mood than she was now.

At this time yesterday, Cassandra Liu was still in her laboratory in Beijing.

It was the rule she set: no one in the laboratory was allowed to answer the phone, not even the mobile phone. She insisted on not using the mobile phone and asked the office to write down the number and call back during the break. The main reason is that you have to change your gloves and wash your hands every time you answer the phone. This is a troublesome procedure, otherwise it is easy to contaminate the sample. I don’t know why, but this time the girl from the office specially ran in to call her, and the person who called her said it was urgent.

She put down the piece of glass helplessly. Your eyes should also take a break. Microscope operation is quite tiring. I opened two doors and arrived at the office. There was a large window on the south-facing wall. I should have been able to see the green sycamore trees in the yard and the white building of the institute opposite. However, it didn't look green that day. It was white. Not like Bai.

"Ah, Professor Liu!" A female voice on the phone claimed to be a secretary in the Pinghu Development Company office, and her name was something, and then said, "Mr. Li asked me to find you. He has a gift for you."

Cassandra Liu frowned. Her husband Victor Li would call her at least every two days, but he had never asked anyone to bring her something. He had never mentioned this when they spoke on the phone the day before yesterday. Moreover, he usually called her home at night or on weekends, and never called the lab to disturb her work. Why did he give her lab phone number to someone who had nothing to do with her this time?

"What gift?" Cassandra Liu tried her best to restrain herself and asked briefly.
 
"I can't possibly know." The woman's voice was very young and a little coquettish. "I'm on a business trip to the Ministry of Water Resources and Electric Power. I just arrived at noon today. Mr. Li asked me to hand the things over to you personally."

"Give it to me with your own hands?" Cassandra Liu couldn't help but look at the girl who asked her to answer the phone. The girl was not far away and raised her head to look at her. She was obviously attracted by her surprised tone. What kind of trick did this Victor Li pull? They have been married for nineteen years, and rarely do they give such romantic "gifts".

"Why do you want to hand it to me personally?"

After Cassandra Liu returned to China, she worked at the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences and never went to the development company headquartered in the dam area, although Victor Li always wanted her to visit him. But he often went to Beijing for meetings, almost twice a month. In fact, he spent as much time in Beijing as in the dam area. Cassandra Liu felt that there was no need to leave her job and go south to visit her husband. In fact, her husband was also very busy in Beijing and rarely had a quiet time at home. This was probably even more so in the dam area, so why did she go? She had no complaints about this. They had not spent much time together for more than ten years.

"Mr. Li instructed me to hand it over to you personally." The other party heard that Cassandra Liu was not in the mood to talk to her, and her tone became stiff. "Actually, it's just a small bag. Please understand that I don't mean to disturb you."

Cassandra Liu also felt that she was overreacting. She didn't have to worry about such a trivial matter, so she just told the other party her Mother Evelyn's phone number and asked the other party to call her Mother Evelyn and hand over the things in person. Go get it.

Although she had to take a car to a remote place like the Summer Palace, the other party had no choice but to agree, with a hint of anger in her voice. But Cassandra Liu insisted that since there are people willing to act in this kind of drama, let the masters play.

Cassandra Liu put down the phone and then noticed something was wrong with the window. The window glass was still the same, but covered with dust and dirt. The green of the trees could be seen just now, but now it looked like some dirty old rags. Usually, she only paid attention to the laboratory being spotless, absolutely meeting the standards of genetic experiments, and fully enclosed with air conditioning and constant temperature. This was the first time she noticed that there was a small gap in the window of this office, and light yellow particles were pouring in. She curiously wiped it with her fingers, and it was very fine dust. She turned around and found that the office staff were busy flipping through files or using computers, and no one was looking at her. Only the girl who had just called her looked up and saw her puzzled face and said three words: "Dust-blowing day."

Cassandra Liu said, "I know, I'm an old Beijinger. But it's already the end of April, and haven't we already had three sandstorms this year?"

The people who seemed to be busy in the office put down their work and started talking. It seemed that the increasingly serious sandstorm in the capital was a hot topic before she came in, but because she was there, they couldn't talk about it anymore. Some people said that it was because Inner Mongolia had reclaimed too much grassland, some said it was due to overgrazing, and some said it was because they bought too much sea buckthorn grass, a traditional Chinese medicine.

Cassandra Liu was far less interested in this topic than the experiment in her hands, so she went back to the laboratory on her own.

When she left the institute after get off work, she, like other female colleagues, could only cover her entire face with a veil. The veil was flowery, and the faces that came out looked weird, like a masquerade. She was used to sandstorms, but standing on the stone steps in front of the institute, the scene on the street still surprised her. The whole city was painted with a layer of khaki, and there was a smell of earth in the air. The visibility was only about a hundred meters, and the layers of high-rise buildings disappeared one by one in the gray fog. Even the trees were pressed down, and the long branches whipped the roadside in the wind. All cars had to turn on the high beams and drive slowly. Pedestrians occasionally appeared like ghosts, with dishevelled hair and dirty faces, walking sideways in the wind and sand. The setting sun was a bit like the morning moon, but it was a dull dark yellow.

She recalled the arguments in the office that afternoon and realized that the dust would not only target Beijing. Every time a sandstorm swept across China from north to south, more than half of the country was in a strange scene that the ancients only experienced during a solar eclipse.

Cassandra Liu felt that sand had entered all the seams in her clothes, as if sand had entered her body, making her bulky. There was a man next to him who probably had a cold and could only breathe through his mouth. His mouth was full of sand and he was vomiting on the ground.

When Cassandra Liu got off work, she received a message from her Mother Evelyn, saying that she had to go to her place no matter what.

On such a dusty day, the Mother Evelyn might have taken Victor Li's inexplicable gift too seriously. Let's talk about it another day. The temperature has dropped significantly, and she still wants to go back to her own home.

Finally, she stopped a taxi and the price was twice as high as usual, but at this time Cassandra Liu could no longer care. When the taxi sailed into the sea of ​​sand like a submarine, she calculated in her mind: If one kilogram per square meter moves southward, Sand, then all the transportation capacity in the country will not be enough to move back the thrown garbage. Huge man-made things are just silly trinkets in front of nature, on the level of children's toys.

The driver asked, "Where to?"

Cassandra Liu was about to ask for the address of her home, but she ended up saying that she wanted to go to the back streets of the Summer Palace. She decided to go see her Mother Evelyn.

Mother Evelyn

She couldn't remember ever following her Mother Evelyn's advice - she had never listened to it since she was a child, and she would regret it if she did. But this time it seemed like she had listened to the right thing.

Her Mother Evelyn seemed to have foreseen something. Although she was talking about a lot of things in a hurry, she still changed the subject again and again, asking her to try to find time to go to Liang County when she went south this time! "After all, that's where you were born."

Cassandra Liu knew that Liang County was her birthplace. She had previously filled in her place of origin as Anyang, Henan, her father's hometown. After she went abroad in 1980, she began to fill in her birthplace only, Chongqing, Sichuan. Later, she learned that she was actually born on a ship from Liang County to Chongqing. That night, her Mother Evelyn told her that when she came into this world, the ship had not yet sailed out of Liang County.

My father died young, during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, Cassandra Liu was still a young girl. After Cassandra Liu boarded an express train from Chengdu to Beijing, she quickly got rid of Sichuan dialect and lived among the children of cadres gathered in the military compound in Beijing. She did not look like a girl. Cassandra Liu always felt that her Mother Evelyn ate something unclean when she was pregnant with her, otherwise it would be impossible to explain. She was not at all like a woman who grew up in the beautiful mountains and rivers of Sichuan.
 
Cassandra Liu once asked her Mother Evelyn. My Mother Evelyn said unhappily, "You ate something 'unclean' in Liang County? You can't imagine that!"

When she stood on the land of Liang County, she couldn't help but smile when she remembered her Mother Evelyn's surprised expression when she said this before. She had never thought of the need to make a special trip to see this place that could only be reached by water. Only yesterday, on the night of flying sand, when the Mother Evelyn and daughter talked until late at night, she felt that it was okay to leave once.