Chapter 335 Wu Liusha is like a woman, cunning and treacherous

He felt that he was entering the water, that under his feet it was no longer a path of stones but mud. Sometimes, on certain seashores in Brittany or Scotland, a man, a traveler or a fisherman, walking on the sand after low tide, away from the shore, suddenly finds that for a few minutes his walking has been a little difficult.The beach was like asphalt under his feet, and the soles of his shoes stuck to it, which was no longer sand but glue.The beach is completely dry, but every time you take a step, when you lift your feet, the footprints left behind are filled with water. Even so, the eyes can't see a little change. The vast beach is clean and peaceful. It seems that the beach is everywhere. Likewise, solid and sunken ground cannot be distinguished.Swarms of joyous sea aphids continued to scurry over the feet of passers-by.The man went on, toward the land, as close as he could to the shore.He has nothing to worry about, so what is there to worry about?However, he already felt that every step he took seemed to put a heavy burden on his feet.Suddenly he sank.It sinks two or three inches.He was obviously going the wrong way, so he stopped and looked for another direction.Suddenly he looked up at his feet, which were no longer visible.It turned out that the sand had buried his feet.He pulled his foot out of the sand, tried to go back, and he turned back, but sank even deeper.The sand reached his ankle, he pulled it out and jumped to the left, the sand got to his calf, he jumped to the right, the sand got to his knees.Then he became inexplicably terrified, and realized that he was trapped in the quicksand, and that below him was a terrible zone where no man could walk and no fish could swim.If he had a burden he would throw it away, as a ship in distress unloads everything, but it was too late, the sand was up to his knees.

He cries, shakes his hat or handkerchief, sinks deeper and deeper; if there is no one on the beach, if it is too far from land, if this quicksand is notoriously sinister, if there are no brave men around, it is all over , he must be caught in the quicksand, must be subjected to this thrilling burial, which is long, inevitable, merciless, takes hours, endlessly, cannot be delayed nor hastened, when you are free When you are standing perfectly healthy, it catches you, it drags your feet, every time you try to struggle hard, every time you yell, it sinks you a little bit more, it seems to punish you with double hugs Your resistance, just like that, a person sinks slowly into the ground, and gives him enough time to look at the horizon, the trees, the green fields, the smoke from the villages on the plain, the sails of the sea, and the flying and flying. The singing birds, the sun and the blue sky.To fall into the quicksand, that is, the grave becomes a sea tide, and rises from the ground to a living person.A merciless burial takes place every minute.The poor man tried to sit, lie down, crawl, everything buried him; he rose again, sank again.He feels overwhelmed; he roars, he cries, he calls out to the clouds, he twists his arms, he despairs.At this moment, the quicksand had reached his abdomen, and the quicksand had reached his chest, leaving only his upper body.He stretched out his hands, groaning furiously, pinching the sand convulsively with his fingers, trying to hold on to the sand to keep it from sinking, propping himself up on his elbows, trying to get out of the soft cover, whimpering wildly; the sand was rising.The sand has reached the shoulders, the neck, and now only the face is visible.The mouth screamed, filled it with sand, and silenced it.The eyes still watch, the sand closes them, the night.Then the forehead sinks, a lock of hair trembles on the sand, and a hand comes out, across the sand, swaying, waving, and then out of sight.One tragically disappears.

Sometimes the rider sank with the horse, sometimes the wagon driver sank with the cart, and they all sank under the sand.It's capsizing the boat elsewhere than in the water, it's the land drowning the man.This land, soaked by the sea, becomes a trap, it presents itself like a field, stretches like a wave.The abyss has this kind of deceit. Such gloomy accidents may have frequently occurred on this or that coast, or in the sewers of Paris thirty years ago. Before the important work started in 1833, the underground tunnels of Paris often collapsed suddenly. Water seeps into certain subterranean layers that are particularly fragile, whether they are primed as in old trenches, or concrete poured with hydraulic lime as in new trenches, and it buckles as soon as it loses its support.In this kind of ground, a pleat is a crack, and a crack can cause a collapse.The channel can be sunken for a long stretch.This fissure, the fissure of the mud in the abyss, is technically called a subsidence.What is subsidence?It is the quicksand of the sea that suddenly goes underground, the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a gutter.After the earth is soaked, it seems to have dissolved, and all its molecules are in a soft state. It is no longer earth, but it is not water either, and sometimes it is very deep.It is extremely dangerous for people to encounter this situation.If water dominates, submersion will occur, and people will die quickly. If mud is dominant, death will be slow. This is subsidence.

Can we imagine this death?If subsidence is scary on the beach, what about in ditches?This is incomparable to being in the wilderness. In broad daylight, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, there are many voices, life is full of clouds under the clouds, boats in the distance, all kinds of hopes, there may be passers-by, until the last moment There might be hope of salvation; but here far from it, here are deaf and blind, with black vaults and finished tombs, to die in covered swamps, slowly smothered by filth, in The mud in the stone coffin stretches its claws and chokes its neck, and when it dies, it smells like a foul smell. The mud replaces the sand, the hydrogen sulfide replaces the hurricane, and the garbage replaces the ocean!Shouting, gnashing of teeth, twisting limbs, struggling, dying gasps, while the great city above you hears nothing!

It was an unspeakable horror to die like this!Death sometimes makes up for its cruelty by a certain terrible sublime; in a wrecked ship man may perform great things; in fire as in water very good things may appear; Man is changed in martyrdom.But not here.This kind of death is unclean.Such death is disgraceful, and the phantasm that floats at last is despicable.Sludge is synonymous with shame.It's small, ugly, shameful.To die in a barrel of luscious wine, like Clarence, is all right; but to die in a scavenger's dump, like Escublo, is terrible, and to writhe in it is hideous , still wallowing in slime on his deathbed.This place is as dark as hell, and the mud is a pond. The dying don't know whether he will become a ghost or a toad.

Elsewhere the tomb is dismal; here it is monstrous. The depth, length and density of the subsidence vary with the quality of the underground soil, sometimes three or four feet down, sometimes eight feet or ten feet down; sometimes bottomless.The silt, almost hardened here and almost liquid there, would take a whole day to kill a man in the Lunier Cave, and five minutes in the Filippo Bore.The degree of loading of silt varies with its density.Where a child can escape, an adult is about to die.To be saved, the first condition is to cast off all burdens.Throw away the tool-bag, or the back or basket, that's the first thing any sewer worker does when he feels the ground give way under his feet.

Subsidence has various causes: the fragility of the soil; subterranean collapses beyond the reach of man; torrential rains in summer; continuous rain in winter; prolonged drizzle.Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a field of marl or sand rests on the vault of the subterranean gallery and deforms it, or the bottom of the trench cracks under the weight.The sinking of the Pantheon a century ago thus blocked part of the canal on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève.When a gutter collapses under the pressure of a house, the reflection of the disorder in some cases is a zig-zagging crack in the center of the street, which appears above the entire length of the cracked roof, when the situation is clearly It's not good, so the emergency repair can be done in time.But there are times when the inner destruction shows no outward traces, and in such cases disaster strikes the scavenger of the sewers.They go unsuspecting into a bottomed ditch, where they may die.According to old archives, several well diggers were buried in the sunken ground in this way.Several names were mentioned, including one named Blaise Butrand, a sewer-sweeper caught in a collapsing ditch beneath the Rue Callem-Brner.This Blaise Buterin was the brother of Nicolas Buterin, the last burial worker of the Cemetery of the Holy Child, which was abolished in 1785.

There was also the young and handsome Viscount Esculelo, whom we have already spoken of, one of the heroes of the siege of Lleida, who marched the city in silk stockings and with a violin.Escublo was one night with his cousin, the Duchess of Suti, when someone came, and, to avoid the duke, he hid himself in a hollow in the gutter of Beautleil, and was drowned.When Mrs. Sutie heard the death described to her, she asked her perfume bottle to smell the salt as much as possible, so that she forgot to cry.In this case there is no testable love, the sludge has extinguished it.Hailuo refused to scrub Leander's body, and Dissbai pinched her nostrils in front of Biram and said, "Bah!"