For the sake of high hills

Lover on the Hill

At the beginning of the last century, a group of people living in a small town in Wales lived with peace of mind. Until one day, two land surveyors from Britain broke the tranquility of the place, and they made a trip to measure the Ffynnon Garw mountain near the town, which according to regulations would not appear on the newly drawn map of the country if the mountain was less than 1,000 feet. People living in the town don't know exactly how tall Ffynnon Garw is, but in their eyes it is a mountain, even a "holy mountain". So, when the surveyors, after some busyness, told them that the mountain was only 984 feet, a mound rather than a peak, the whole town fell into an unprecedented panic in an instant. Because in the eyes of the people in the town, if there is no location of the mountain on the map, the town will cease to exist, and they will be reduced to people without a hometown. Thus began a campaign to "raise the mountain." The men, women and children of the town, led by the goat mongen, all threw themselves into this great movement. On the one hand, they need to drag the surveyors (tyres, seduction, etc.) to buy time, and on the other hand, they must raise the hill to more than 1,000 feet in a short period of time. However, the sky is not beautiful, and the mounds built up during the day are always washed away by the heavy rainstorms at night, and so on. Instead, this inspired the morale of the townspeople, and even the priests and surveyors who opposed the counterfeiting in the first place joined the ranks of orogeny. They finally fulfilled the mission they had given them, so that the nameless hill finally reached 1002 meters and appeared on the national map in the name of a mountain...

This is a movie I saw many years ago, and the title is blurred, but I still remember the old priest's sermon in the church: "... I see this as a celebration of the earth. One day, our descendants will play in the land we have struggled with, and the old people will see it under the valley and remember the spirit of that year... You will see that I will take God's soil without hesitation, ascend to Ffynnon Garw, and I will build up the mound and offer it to God..."

This is a film in the true sense of the word, and the deep and rich theme of human nature it contains is also one of the literary motifs that I have thought twice. It seems to me that the only thing a writer can do is perhaps to add a little height to a nameless hill similar to Ffynnon Garw, to make it appear on the map of your mind in the name of a mountain, so that it will not be erased by people because of its humbleness, otherwise you will be like the townspeople, because of the indistinct location of your hometown and fall into an inescapable panic.

There is also such a hill in my hometown of Jingmen, Hubei Province, and I still don't know how many meters it has. When I was a child, I thought it was very tall, high enough to hide the sun behind it. When I had enough strength to climb to the top of the mountain, I found that it was not capable of hiding the sun, because standing on the top of the mountain, I saw that the sun was still burning in the west, and there were one similar hill after another in the west. I came down from the mountain and moved away from it faster and faster. Later I climbed many tall peaks, but no matter where I went, I always felt that no mountain was higher or more difficult to climb than it. It belonged to the remnants of the Great Hongshan Mountain, and I had never seen it on any scale map of enlargement or reduction, but on the devastated map of the depths of my heart, it stood majestically like a sleepless lamp shining on the pitch-black sky.

I often think of the days when rolling stones down the mountain or pushing stones up the mountain, and I often think of the mountains full of wild date trees, azaleas, dark clouds gliding lightly over the sexy slopes, we run and play in the grass, I don't know if we are dead or alive... No one has ever told me that every mountain has a day when it gets smaller, but such a day has come: many years after I left my hometown, a childhood friend brought in countless excavators and bulldozers, and gradually "removed" the fairy mountain in the rumbling cannon - he dug out a shovel full of silicic acid-filled sand, transported it away in a truck, and sent it into the 330 cement factory, and these cement became an important building material for the Three Gorges Dam that cut off the Yangtze River. I think that the fairy mountain that disappeared here has appeared there in another form, and only those who have a clear heart can see it.

"You still have your hometown, and all I have left is my hometown." The sadness and indignation contained in this poem are not my own.

Like the people in the town in the movie, I will be afraid, I will be cunning, and I will use all my physical and mental strength to prevent the hill in my heart from dying. Although we were back to back, we each had a similar hill in our eyes, "You turn over and you see your father's grave / I turn over and I see my mother's."