Chapter 44 forty three

Boy Daniel (2) Nick's house in Daniel's impression is the white house that can be seen from the street. This four-story house is very long. Almost a quarter of the block.Because the white building behind the iron railing was so close to the street and so large, it never occurred to Daniel that there would be a garden behind the house.He had heard Maria talk about this garden, but had never been able to see it with his own eyes.Maria once told him that the Nick family was an old resident in this area, with a large family business and deep roots.But their family has been in decline since the middle of the last century. Somehow, the family members have also been separated. Now only the disabled Nick, an old grandfather, a cook and an old servant with defective eyes are left in the family.There are more than one hundred rooms in this house, and it takes a long time to walk from the east end to the west end.Once, a municipal census officer went to their house, and the young man went through the house. He said with certainty that he had seen all the rooms, but he didn't see this family. Where did they live? where?

Daniel followed Nick through his family's house and into the huge, smoke-colored see-through tent.He has never seen such a big tent in his life, and the inside looks like a small square, and the material used to make the tent is also new to him, neither cloth nor plastic, but a bit like some kind of transparent membrane on animals, but He couldn't think of any animal with such a membrane.There was an orange hot air balloon in the center of the tent. When I got closer, there were several bowls of dying orchids in the basket under the balloon. "This is my family's garden." As soon as Nick spoke, there was a resonant "buzzing" sound all around.

Daniel looked back and found that Nick's wheelchair was already floating in the air, and he looked dejected inside the wheelchair, his handsome face was a little gray, and the corners of his mouth drooped ugly, as if he was about to fall ill. "Nick!!" Daniel yelled anxiously, and was soon startled by the noise he was making.There were non-stop noises as if glass windows were broken, and the hot air balloon began to move slowly. Daniel wanted to exit from this disturbing place, but at the entrance they came in, he saw a ferocious man standing there, holding a machete. "Where should I work?" He mustered up the courage to ask again, and suddenly felt the pain in his eardrum as if it had been punctured.

Nick's wheelchair circled the tent, rising higher and higher, and his voice came from above: "It starts from the mud under your feet, where there are populus euphratica." Daniel climbed into the hot air balloon, the balloon vacated, and after a while, it burst out through a gap in the tent.But this balloon does not rise very high, it always swims in the air five or six meters above the ground, and never leaves Nick's house.Daniel saw the huge tent bulging and deflated like a frog's belly, and heard Nick screaming inside.Under the blue sky, the situation of Nick's house is really weird.Daniel always thought that his family was the strangest. He didn't expect this situation, and he forgot his original intention of coming here.

Under the partition in the gondola under the hot air balloon where Daniel was, someone suddenly spoke.He leaned over the crevice and looked down, and saw two people sitting on the floor below the gondola. They were two very old men with wrinkles on their faces like crevices in the rock.One of them was asleep, and the other was thinking. "Hey," Daniel said, knocking on the partition, "are you the owners of this house? Can you tell me where your garden is? I want to work! I can't fly around in mid-air all day, can I?" Although he said such a long list, the waking old man just looked at him vigilantly, and looked a little bit cowering.He seems to want to keep his body as small as possible.

"Excuse me, are you the master?" Daniel roared. The old man stood up tremblingly, uttering these words with difficulty: "Don't shout...danger...cliff..." The basket hit something violently, and Daniel's eyes went black.He got up and sat in the wooden chair.Hot air balloons are still hovering over the family.Daniel suddenly understood that the family spent most of their time in this hanging basket, so the investigators of the city hall could not find them. So why did Nick hire him to do the garden?So far he had not seen even a shadow of the garden.In their house, apart from the big house, there is this huge tent behind, and outside the tent is this open space.Maybe that tent was really Nick's garden, and there was something in it that Daniel couldn't see because he wasn't as sharp as Nick.Daniel saw a picture of Nick's wheelchair flying in the tent in the middle of the night.This is what he calls the anxious insomniac.At this time, he discovered a miracle: Those pots of orchids bloomed vigorously.He counted, and there were twelve flowers in total, and there were still a few that were just about to bloom.Looking at them, Daniel couldn't help but wonder: Is Nick planning to let himself fly in mid-air?

What about cultivating flowers and plants?Daniel didn't like the feeling of being suspended in mid-air, and he couldn't figure out how to work in such an environment—he couldn't even sit still.So the two old men under the partition, do they think it is safer to be in a hot air balloon than in a house? Someone yelled from below that it was Nick coming out into the clearing and waving his arms for Daniel to come down. "Jump down, jump quickly! The balloon is about to explode!!" He looked pale. There was a "buzz" in Daniel's mind, he climbed to the side of the hanging basket, closed his eyes and fell down.

Fortunately, he fell on the soil and was not injured. The soil in this open space is very soft. "Oh, you've crushed a whole bunch of violets!" said Nick. Daniel found that Nick had a knife wound on his face and was bleeding, so he couldn't help crying.