Chapter 99：They came to the fishermen mountains

Those who sold dried fruits and nuts earned about $ 500 a month. But they could only sell products for three months a year.

Previously, the Fishermen Mountains were densely populated, but with the ruin of the collective farms, these mountains were left completely without people. It was only possible to meet old abandons - schools, houses, cultural palaces, a post office, a telegraph ... since it was near the steppe, the bricks and wood were pulled apart. And they sold the iron. Therefore, for the most part in the mountains, there were only fragments of old buildings, ruins are easier said.

Only deep inside the mountains, separate whole villages remained, but there were only two or three of them.

Leaving the mountains, the jeep rushed along a dusty dirt road, forward, north, to the horizon, a dark blue mountain loomed. There they went. Steppe. Mostly red from poppies. Sometimes standing standing like pillars, about 3 meters high - orange and violet erimuros, such tall plants with tubes on which there were flowers. They were good honey plants. Honey from them turned out to be especially fragrant and with a small bitterness. It was sold at an expensive price, 1 kg cost $ 45. Whereas regular honey made from cotton had a price of only $ 10.

Sometimes Barno saw how the stones in the steppe came to life and tried to escape. These were large desert turtles, 30 centimeters in length, since the desert was 25 km from the steppe.

The closer the mountains were, the higher the mountain became. Two places were located one on the southern slope which was directly in front of them, and the second in the center. Good. That the mountains were small and low. These mountains remained from the movement of the glacier. The remnant mountains, folded by slates.

The entrance to the southern slope was through the now abandoned miners' village, during the second empire in the 60s gold was mined in these mountains, then gold reserves were depleted, but uranium began to appear as an accompanying rock. Development stopped, and the village still existed until the end of the 90s, the 20th century, when the last inhabitants left it.

After a couple of years, wood, iron and bricks were almost all pulled apart. Now the travelers were not met by a settlement with 400 houses, but only small ruins with the remains of a couple of houses. Dull look. The jeep drove by, Barno was somehow saddened by what she saw. Dara thought that there was basically nothing to catch. Since all prospectors and miners probably all took with them when they left.

The village flashed in the blink of an eye, so they did not think much about it. The car drove along the once asphalt road, which for almost 40 years has become unusable and has become rather just dirt. The remains of the asphalt were smashed by heavy trucks, which in the 00s scrapped almost all the pebbles from two rivers lying a little further from the mine. Then, decentralization occurred, and the metropolitan authorities poorly controlled the situation on the ground. Therefore, in 10 years there has been a predatory use of natural resources. Then they put things in order, but many rivers were left without pebbles, so the case of mudflows became more frequent, as the environmental situation changed.

Dara only saw the offices on the ground, the remains of the brickwork of the foundation. It was necessary to punch or check with geophysical equipment for the detection of voids and also turn on the metal detector and use a special scanner to detect non-ferrous metals.

Ordinary treasure hunters could not afford such a scanner, since it cost $ 45,800. But who he had, the range of their searches was greater than those who had just a metal detector.

Dara asked Fang to study the place of the old reservoir, Baraz stayed with him and Dara himself and the company decided to study the ruins of the caravanserai.