Hati Barkala's place

A trip to the local history museum yielded nothing. It had a poor exposition, historians and museum workers did not say anything concrete. So both cousins ​​left disappointed.

"We wasted our money on the trip! There is nothing here! "Well, at least we enjoyed the wonderful views, which is also not bad, dear cousin!"

Shir-Ali noticed with a broad grin with all his mouth.

"Fuck! What to rejoice at! They found nothing "! His hands trembled finely, he spoke in raised tones, the whites of his eyes began to fill with blood. "This has increased your pressure, brother, do not swear all the time, it's bad, someday it will affect you," Shir-Ali remarked, half a joke in half-serious. Dara did not yet know that his cousin's advice would be very timely, but his old habits, going back to high school graduation, swearing with or without reason, will bring him a lot of headaches shortly. In the literal sense of the word.

"What are we going to do now?" "Let's go home," Yawning answered Dara.

"It's cold here, chilly, just wasted time and money!" "I can walk along the old river beds, I am on Google earth, I saw promising places to walk with a metal detector," suggested Shir-Ali.

"So that we're not wasting our time, make up your mind" ?! he persuaded his cousin. "Okay, okay, let's go for a walk!" "Is there only a foundation left or are there also ruins?"

Dara asked interested. "Judging by Google's data, this is an abandoned village of the 20-the 30s of the 20th century, with forced resettlement, then the highlanders were afraid that they would not accept the new government.

There they also had old medieval fortresses in the mountains. Therefore, to prevent them, they were resettled to the plains so that they could be engaged in agriculture.

" Shir-Ali explained. "Interesting area! Why then did they not return to their village "?

"The water is gone, you saw, the riverbed has dried up, there are still about 2-3 such gorges, where there are such ruins of villages on the slopes, but their people left on their own in the 50s of the 20th century".

"I still think that the village of the 1920s and 1930s is more interesting, people left in a hurry, probably they hid valuables in their houses, maybe we'll find something interesting"?

"Maybe so"! Dara, cheered up a little. A trip to the outback gave them nothing but a waste of money. Well, not always treasure hunters manage to hit the jackpot. As a rule, according to the conditional statistics of the treasure hunters themselves, a year they can find a gold coin or a gold thing once or twice, thirty times silver, and all the rest is copper and other colored garbage. From bottle caps to brass buttons, aluminum pans without a bottom, zinc buckets, cast iron boilers, wire, and other household waste.

The trip from the center of the administrative center of the district, where the local history museum was located to the abandoned villages, ran through small hills and foothills on the southern side, and on the northern side lay the steppe.

The area was rich in historical artifacts, promising for the prospect of coins and gold. During the Silk Road period, this area was the border of two worlds - sedentary and nomadic. The mountains were a natural wall between farmers and nomads.

And on the steppe there were trade routes, caravans went, transporting from mountain gold mines and mines, gold sand and nuggets, turquoise, diamonds, and rubies. To the regional bazaars in Chanyan, Turpan, Kashgar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Herat, Mashhad, Agra, Keder. Over the past 5 thousand years, caravans carrying goods, gold, coins, precious stones, steel armor, sabers, pikes, arrows have been moving along mountain paths that turn into steppe and desert paths. Something must remain in the ground. The trip was not so exhausting.

Already the cousins ​​are walking along the old bed of a dry mountain river. On the second terrace, they found the walls of houses built of stones, there were about 20 of them. The stones are flat, their color ranged from purple to light blue.

These are slates. All that remains of a small village. The tree is prized in the mountains.

Therefore, all the elements of the house made of wood were carried away by other highlanders long ago. Only the stone walls remained.

The houses of the highlanders are small, 2-3 rooms, with low ceilings of 1.5 - 1.7 meters. So it was easier to build and heat them in winter. The rafters are wooden, they were covered with turf for warming, and on top, they were already laid with flat stones, they kept warm well from the sun. These were the old dwellings of the highlanders built during the Middle Ages and feudalism.

During the period of socialism, their houses have changed, they have become larger, the ceilings are higher - 2 meters. The walls are thicker. Yes, and they used clay bricks, already burnt in the sun. But that's for another story.

While inspecting the houses, they drove over them with a shovel, which was a metal detector. But there were no interesting signals. Only a couple of times have they fished out the remnants of flattened lead bullets from the walls.

Nothing interesting. But suddenly their attention was attracted by a fireplace built into the wall, in the sun there, something glittered.

"Maybe gold"? In hope, he thought, greedy for Gift money? At the same time, the cousins ​​touched the shiny brick ... and in the blink of an eye found themselves in a dark cave ... ... they did not know that that cave was in the area of ​​the Sivalik Hills, there were Sal trees all around.

They were just a couple of hundred meters from the city of Dehra Dun, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At the time when the market "Hati Barkala" was still the site of the "Camp of war elephants" and on the site of the house of the brigadier general, there was a rainforest. Did both cousins ​​end up in another world, a time machine? Nobody knew that!