True
Story
6,000 Steps to
Paradise
1, A Stone Ladder
18 November
2006
It was in autumn 2001. A
group of explorers had walked through a
dense, primeval forest in central China’s
Sichuan province for two days. During the
time they had not encountered a single
soul, which made them suspect that they
might have entered one of the remotest
reaches on the planet.
Soon they once again were
confronted with a steep hill that had its
peak penetrated into the clouds. Just
when they were about to do a hard rock
climbing, a team member yelled out,
"A ladder! Someone has prepared a
ladder for us!"
He was not kidding. Not at
all.
At the end of the tortuous
trail that supposedly no-one ever took,
there it was – a set of steps on a
steep slope right stretching toward the
lofty top of the hill, looked as if a
linkage between earth and heaven.
But what surprised them the
most was the fact that steps were
evidently not an ancient remainder.
Recent chisel marks on the stones and
fresh soil scattered around all suggested
that the steps were newly constructed.
Mysterious and uncanny as it
seemed, they took the offer anyway. In
the next two hours, they climbed 6000
steps wriggling their way up.
Once on the top, they found
themselves landed in a level field with a
view bluntly opened up before them. Under
an unblemished blue sky, mountain shore
stretched beyond sight.
All was quiet in the vast
expanse of this untamed wildness.
Then someone heard a noise
or two from deep in the thick woods. A
thought that it might be from a beast set
their nerve on edge.
The rustling noise among the
thick foliage became louder and near,
eventually two figures surfaced into the
open.
To the great relieve of
everybody in the team, they were not
beasts, but people, one man one woman, in
their advanced years. Both wearing
old-fashion blue outfits paled from many
washes and carrying firewood on their
back, they were like the ones from
another era, an era that the explorers
only caught a glimpse of on the movie or
TV screens.
Questions at once emerged in
everyone’s mind: Who were they? Why
were they here? And what made them roam
beyond the fringe of the civilised world?
2,
A Beautiful Bride
(References:
numerous Chinese newspaper reports, TV
programs and online medias)
China
stories are told at wenhousecrafts.com
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