Firelight played across the walls inside the cave, reflecting a vivid red glow.
Amid the red, streaks of yellow and black appeared here and there, like Hua on a tiger.
But Pan Long could not find so much as a speck of silver-white.
"Is this really a Silver Mine?" he asked. "Why can't I find any silver?"
Donald was searching carefully too. After a while, he shook his head. "Perhaps the Silver Mine lies deeper in the cave. Good things always come only after hardship."
Pan Long frowned and followed him deeper into the cave.
The cave was spacious enough. Not only could people walk through it, they could probably push a small cart inside. If they found the Silver Mine, extracting the ore should be convenient.
But first, they had to find it.
They followed the cave for some fifty or sixty meters, yet everything they saw looked much the same as before. There was no sign of silver anywhere.
"Are you sure you didn't make a mistake?" Pan Long finally asked. "If the stream flowing out of this cave carries traces of silver, there should at least be some in here."
Donald looked baffled too. "I sifted silver grains from the river mud with my own hands. There's no mistake!"
Yet they had searched the ground all along the way, and the stream running past their feet held not a single visible grain of silver.
As Pan Long had said, if there really was a Silver Mine here, and it was rich enough to form a deposit in the riverbed outside, there should have been at least a few tiny grains in the stream beneath their feet.
Silver was heavy. The Water Stream could not have swept it all away. Besides, the cave floor was uneven, with hollows