Jin Yong - The Book and The Sword

"They must be tunnels," he said.

"Yes. Now how do we find them?" She looked at the explanation on the map and slowly deciphered it. "To enter the palace, climb the tall tree and call out "Ailongabasheng" three times towards the sacred mountain."

"What is Ailongabasheng?" Princess Fragrance asked.

"It must be the password," Huo Qingtong replied. "But where is the tall tree? And could this really be a magic spell?"

"Of course it could," said Princess Fragrance, who had always believed in spirits and fairies.

"In the old days, there would have been people in the mountain who would have pushed a switch when they heard the password, opening a cave entrance," said Chen. But after so many years, everyone in there is certainly dead."

The howls of the wolves sounded closer. "Let's go and hide in one of the houses," Huo Qingtong suggested.

The three turned and ran towards the closest of the buildings. As they ran, Chen tripped on a bulge on the ground and saw it was the stump of a huge tree. "The tree's here!" he called.

Princess Fragrance examined the sheer face of the mountain above and pointed. "That must be the cave mouth there. Look, aren't those footholds?" Chen and Huo Qingtong looked up and saw with delight that there were indeed notches in the rock face.

"I'll go up and have a look," said Chen. With the dagger in his right hand, he bounded up the cliff. He made it up about a dozen feet then used his Inner Strength Kung Fu to lodge the dagger in the rock face for an instant and race up further. Finally, he reached the point where the footholds began. The two girls cheered from below, and Chen waved to them before turning his attention to the cliff above. Over the years, the cave mouth had become blocked by sand. Chen grabbed an outcrop of jade rock with one hand and started to shift some of the sand with the dagger. He pulled broken slabs of rock out one after another, and let them drop to the ground, and in a short while had made a hole large enough to wriggle through. He crawled in and sat down. Then, pulling his Pearl Strings from his pocket, he undid them all, tied them together end to end and dangled the resulting rope down the cliff face to the girls waiting below.

Huo Qingtong tied the rope round her sister's waist and Chen slowly pulled her up. Just as she reached the cave mouth, she screamed, and Chen quickly helped her inside, saying: "Don't worry, you've made it."

Her face was deathly pale. "Wolves!" she cried.

Chen looked down and saw seven or eight wolves had already arrived at the base of the cliff. Huo Qingtong was valiantly fighting them off with her sword. The white horse shook its mane and neighed loudly then galloped off through the streets of the ancient city.

Chen hastily grabbed some large rocks from around the cave mouth and threw them down, forcing some of the wolves to back away, then dropped the rope down again. Huo Qingtong was afraid that in her weak condition, she would be unable to hold on long enough, so she transferred the sword to her left hand, and tied the rope round her waist as she continued to fight off the wolves.

"Right!" she yelled. Chen yanked on the rope and she flew into the air just as two wolves threw themselves at her. One of them bit deeply into her boot and refused to let go. As Princess Fragrance screamed in fright, Huo Qingtong bent over in mid-air and chopped it in half across its belly. The top half of its body accompanied her up to the cave mouth.

Chen helped her inside and tried unsuccessfully to pull the half-wolf off her boot.

"Did it bite into you?" he asked quickly.

"I'm all right," she replied. She took the dagger from his hand and cut open the wolf's mouth, revealing the serried ranks of teeth sunk deep into her boot. A small trickle of blood oozed out of one of the holes in the leather.

"Your foot is wounded," Princess Fragrance said. She helped her sister remove the boot, and ripped a strip of material off her gown to bandage the wound. Chen turned his head away, not daring to look at her bare feet.* (* In traditional China, feet were considered one of the most erotic parts of the female anatomy.)

When she had finished the bandaging, Princess Fragrance looked down at the thousands of wolves amongst the buildings below, and wagged her finger at them angrily. "You evil wolves, biting my sister's foot! I won't feel sorry for you any more," she scolded them as Chen and Huo Qingtong smiled.

They turned to look into the cave, but all they could see was pitch-blackness. Huo Qingtong took out her tinderbox and lit it, and immediately jumped in fright: they were sitting on a thin ledge and next to them was a drop of nearly two hundred feet down to the floor of the cave, which looked even lower than the ground outside the mountain.

"There has been no fresh air in here for a long time," said Chen. "We can't go down yet." After a while, when he thought most of the stale air would have dissipated, he said: "I'll go down first to have a look around."

"Once we're down it won't be easy to get back up again," said Huo Qingtong.

Chen smiled. "If we can't, we can't," he said. Huo Qingtong blushed and looked away.

He tied one end of the rope round a rock outcrop and started to slide down into the abyss, but when he reached the end of the rope, he was still a hundred feet from the bottom. Abandoning the rope, he climbed down the cliff face for a way, and then jumped lightly to the floor.

"Throw down the tinderbox!" he shouted and Huo Qingtong did so. He struck a light, and under its glow, he saw he was in a chamber carved entirely out of white jade furnished with several sets of wooden tables and chairs. Chen looked up and saw the two girls peering down from the ledge, and shouted: "Come down!"

"You go down first, sister," Huo Qingtong said. Princess Fragrance took hold of the rope and slid slowly down to its end. She saw Chen standing beneath her with his hands opened wide, closed her eyes tightly and let go. Almost immediately, she felt his strong arms catch her and place her lightly on the ground. Huo Qingtong jumped down in the same fashion and as Chen embraced her, she flushed deep red with embarrassment.

By now, the howls of the wolves outside the mountain were becoming faint. Chen looked at their shadows dancing on the white jade walls, and then at the two beauties beside him. Under the glow of the reflected light, they looked even more exquisite. Here they were, the three of them, in the bowels of a mountain, not knowing what was in store for them. Of all the strange things that had happened to him in his eventful life, this was the strangest.

Chen snapped off a chair leg and lit it with the flame from the tinder-box. Princess Fragrance exclaimed at the beauty of the chamber they were in, and taking the torch from Chen began walking about. He broke off another seven chair legs and the three began to walk off along a long tunnel which turned out to be a cul-de-sac. Chen wondered how they would get out. Then in a corner of the tunnel, he noticed something sparkling under the torchlight. He walked over and saw it was a gold suit of armour containing a pile of old bones. The suit of armour was exquisitely-made, and the three marvelled at the fine workmanship.

"He must have been a nobleman," said Princess Fragrance. Huo Qingtong noticed that there was a winged camel engraved on the breast plate and added: "He may even have been the king or a prince. I've heard that in ancient times, only kings could use winged camels as their emblem."

"It's the same with the dragon in China," replied Chen. He took the torch from Princess Fragrance and began to examine the end wall of the tunnel for some trace of a door or an opening mechanism. Raising the torch, he saw a huge ring door knocker with a long-handled axe lodged in it.

"There's a door," Huo Qingtong exclaimed joyfully. Chen passed the torch over to her and tried to pull the axe away, but it had rusted onto the iron ring and was immovable. He took out his dagger and scraped away the rust, then with an effort, managed to pull the axe free. He found it very heavy.