My name is Ma Shouyi. I'm from Pingliang in the northwest, and I've worked the loess earth since I was a boy. In this life, I've gone down into more than thirty pits, dug into Han tombs and plundered Western Xia mausoleums. I've seen the living, the dead, and things I can't explain. Later, someone asked me what I feared most in this line of work. I took a puff from my dry tobacco pipe, thought for a long while, and said: What scares me most is climbing out of a pit and finding an extra footprint on the ground.
This is the account of a tomb raider from the northwest.
