An oppressive sense of emptiness came over me, something that hadn’t occurred while on the river. Then as a cold, powerful wind came sweeping out of the darkness, we had to move away from the edge. “Why does it seem like there’s nothing out there?” the deputy squad leader asked me. “It’s like outer space. What is this place?”
I searched the geological lexicon, but my brain could find no term suitable. I could think of only one way in which a place like this could have been created: after the limestone cave system had reached its final stage, an enormous portion of it had collapsed, forming this cavity. It was a marvelous geological spectacle. That I should actually see such a rare phenomenon in my lifetime made me feel, quite abruptly, as if I were about to cry. I continued to stare at it in astonishment when a loud boom suddenly rang out and several beams of light appeared from the side of the dam facing into the abyss. In a moment, all but two were extinguished. They then began to pivot side by side, seemingly from a fixed point, the beams sweeping through the darkness. A searchlight had been switched on. Someone was inside the dam!
The deputy squad leader immediately became alert. “Could there still be Japanese soldiers here?” he asked in a low voice.
Impossible, I thought to myself. “No,” I said, beginning to smile. “It’s probably Wang Sichuan!” I wanted to yell aloud to let him know we were here.
Before I could utter a sound, dread enveloped me. My body went stiff. As I watched the searchlights probe that endless dark, I was unable to move a single step. I’ve always felt there are marked differences between the sensations of fright and dread. Fright originates from sudden occurrences. Though whatever causes the fright might not, in and of itself, be scary at all, it manages to become so by either suddenly appearing or disappearing. Dread is different. Dread results only after reflection and requires some time to ferment in the mind. For example, this dread I felt watching that unending dark, it manifested only after I’d begun to imagine what might be out there. In itself there was nothing scary about the dark. If you asked me what I saw down in that abyss, I could say only dread. For in fact, I saw nothing at all.
How vast was the abyss? I had believed it would be comparable to something I’d seen or heard about, but as I watched the searchlights shine across it, I realized the word vast was entirely inadequate to describe its size. Military searchlight beams generally reach forty-five hundred to six thousand feet, meaning they can illuminate objects from over a kilometer away. This searchlight illuminated nothing, extending out into the abyss until at last the far end of it was swallowed up by the darkness. It was as if the beam had been aimed into the night sky. A moment later I understood. My jaw dropped open. The deputy squad leader saw my shocked expression. After hearing my explanation, his eyes went wide. Cold sweat trickled down my back. At once I understood why the devils had endured such hardships to transport a bomber down into this cave. They’d planned to fly it into the abyss.
CHAPTER 31
The Abyss
The whole thing was beyond strange—not just the scene that lay before me, but also what the devils had done. It was all so creepy. It gave me a profound understanding of the deeply irregular way the Japanese behaved. I’m afraid that only a people as paranoid as them could have carried out such an aff air. A gigantic Shinzan bomber took off from an underground river thirty-six hundred feet underground, flew into a black abyss, and then disappeared. Over the many years that have passed since then, this image has stayed with me, like a nightmare that never goes away. I’m unable to shake it from my mind.
I imagined the Japanese prospectors reaching this point. Certainly there were no natural wonders like this on an island nation like Japan. How must they have felt? Probably just as I did now. As they looked out at that boundless darkness, were they seized by an intense desire to explore it, to see what was hidden within?
I continued to watch the point where the searchlight vanished. For a long time I was spellbound. At last a cold wind broke me from my trance, and I began to shake all over. I pulled myself together at once, muttering that this was no time to get excited. Romanticizing requires an environment both safe and secure. This place was neither.
The searchlight beam began to move again. It has to be Wang Sichuan, I thought to myself. Helping each other along, the deputy squad leader and I made our way toward the light. In a place like this, finding another person was no small thing. We wanted to meet up with him as soon as possible and come up with a way out of here. Our assignment was finished. Although I feared the military would attempt to replicate whatever the Japanese had done, right now it had nothing to do with us.
The searchlight was surely located within the facility’s machine room, a place filled with the valves and mechanisms used to regulate the water level. We just didn’t know where the entrance was. The deputy squad leader yelled out, “Engineer Wang,” several times, but he knew his voice would never reach. As soon as the words left his mouth, they were swept up by the wind and carried away. Once we were right above the searchlight, we could see the beam was shooting from somewhere within the body of the dam, but there seemed no way in from up here. There was only a vertical iron ladder, like the one we’d just climbed, leaning against the outside of the dam, but it was honestly too terrifying. As brave as Wang Sichuan was, even he wouldn’t have dared to descend from here into the black abyss. After walking a while more, we came upon a ruined part of the dam. A large section had caved in. Within the breach was a set of emergency stairs. Making our way down, we came upon an iron door on the side of the dam. We went inside.
The room was pitch-black, but given how dark it was outside, this was nothing I wasn’t used to. Sure enough, it soon became clear that the dam really had been designed for only short-term use. The concrete walls were covered with spreading cracks and exposed steel bars. The machine room might have been better termed a “machine facility.” It was divided into a number of stories. The concrete floor was pockmarked with holes, looking similar to those in the half-torn-down buildings you see today. There were a number of wooden boxes near the entrance, covered by a dry oilcloth. Dust filled the air as we pulled it off. Through the holes in the floor we could make out a faint light, many stories down. It had to be the tail end of the searchlight. The primary machine room was probably at the very bottom. I could feel some vague sense of the gigantic apparatus down there. The wind had died down, but from outside the sound of water was still frighteningly loud. We called for quite some time, but there was no response. He couldn’t hear us and we couldn’t find a way down.
“What now?” I asked the deputy squad leader.
Each of the dam’s floors was much taller than average building stories. Jumping was out of the question. The deputy squad leader dropped a piece of concrete through a hole in the floor, but we could neither see where it landed nor hear the sound it made. There was still no response from below.
“It seems we can’t get down from here,” he said. “We’ll have to find another way.”
I cursed to myself and shined the flashlight around the room. The light was almost out. This flashlight’s lifespan was already way above average. It should have gone out much earlier, back when we were first exploring the sinkhole. There was no point placing any outsize hopes on it working much longer. I turned to the deputy squad leader. “First we have to find a new light source,” I said. “Otherwise, when our flashlight goes out, we’ll be stuck.”