Of course, the culprit of this situation was the nearby fire, but at the same time, there was a "small mistake" when setting fire - when everyone set fire all the way along the direction of the railway embankment, due to lack of experience, the section of the separation belt outside the gate of the Red Mansion was not ignited at the same time, but was two days late, so the fireworks drove all kinds of creatures in the nearby grass to the vicinity of the Red Mansion.

Obviously, for the biosphere near the Red Mansion, the Red Mansion and the open space in front of the building at this time are like a shelter in this catastrophe, an oasis in the desert, even if it is only because the fire here is two days late, it has caused a large-scale gathering of all kinds of wild animals and insects near the Red Mansion!

During that time, for several days on end, all the windows and doors of the Red House had to be shut, including the door to the top floor.

For safety, many places have also sealed the gaps with tape to prevent mosquitoes and ants from burrowing into the building.

In short, the magnitude of this fire and the urgency of the invasion not only surprised everyone, but also impressed everyone, who did not expect that the open area near the Red Mansion would become a place of refuge for all kinds of animals and insects!

In those days when the smoke and flames were everywhere, the windows of the entire Red Mansion were crawling with all kinds of lizards, spiders, ants, moths, wild bees and all kinds of unknown insects that avoided the fire, and there were even swarms of snakes under the corner of the outer wall of the building!

It's so scary, there is wood!

At this moment, the open land outside the gate of the Red Mansion is full of crocodiles and various small animals hiding from the fire, these animals are at the top of the wild food chain, and it is also because of this fire that people can see a spectacle: these ordinary natural enemies can actually live in peace here!

On the open ground and on the walls below the second floor, the density of various insects is enough to make people with dense phobia faint.

All in all, this scene makes the people in the Red Mansion look creepy.

Therefore, in this case, who would dare to open the door to the open-air platform on the roof to see the scenery?

However, these animals did not escape the fire in the end, and soon the flames finally burned into the grass outside the gate of the Red Mansion, so that more animals and insects entered the open space outside the Red Mansion, and the insects on the walls and glass windows outside the Red Mansion were more dense.

Well, in the face of this scene, even the experienced old Wang Lao Zhu Hou Xianglin and Cao Limei were a little unexpected.

What to do?

In the end, everyone discussed two ways, one is to wait for the surrounding fireworks to dissipate, then these snakes, insects, rats and ants will slowly disperse, or take the initiative to pour a few barrels of gasoline on the open ground or something, anyway, there is no fire on the open ground at present, and pouring gasoline on the ground will only burn the ground, so as long as you are careful not to pour gasoline on the walls of the Red Mansion, this masonry and concrete building will not be ignited.

So, the group of people in the Red Mansion, who were already frightened by the scene outside the window or set fire to it a little crazy, finally chose the latter.

As for the question of how to pour gasoline on the open ground, it is very simple: several barrels of gasoline are poured into the buckets of two fully enclosed loaders, then drive to the open field outside the Red Building, pour the gasoline on the ground, and after a few round trips, send a few tightly wrapped men to the roof of the building and throw a few torches down......

After a long time, everyone dared to go out to check, and found that in addition to the side close to the Moon River, the three red brick walls below the second floor of the Red Mansion had been smoked black by the smoke and fire, and the charcoal ash burned by various animals and insects in the open ground and the nearby grass was several inches thick......

It's not just the scene on the side of the Red Mansion that makes people look frightened, but the entire surface of the water from the southern creek and the canal of the Moon River that leads water from the southern creek and the Moon River is covered with the corpses of various insects, and from a distance it looks like the water surface is covered with a gray membrane, which has drifted from the upstream of the creek and the Moon River, which has been burned by fire for several days.

On the south side of the beach, although the grass is not dense, it is still covered by fireworks, and everyone sees the beautiful mangrove beach in the distance gradually surrounded by tongues of fire, and then enveloped in thick smoke, and in a moment, the leafy mangrove forest is gone, and the white beach is also smoked yellow-black by the smoke.

Later, a large number of unknown migratory bird carcasses were found near the charred mangrove forest, as well as several charred saltwater crocodiles......

This is man's conquest of nature.

In early March, the burning operation finally came to an end, because the wildfire had burned far away, and the front of the railway construction route was left with nothing but smoke and the smell of burnt in the air.

Without the dense grass and shrubs, there was little mosquito nuisance, and as far as the eye could see, the southeast to the coast was a flat river, where the red steel barrel dock and the Nicole moored there seemed to be close at hand.

However, it is known that it was a visual error caused by the flat terrain and the tall hull of the Nicole, because the straight-line distance from the Red House to the Red Pier was eight kilometers, and the actual length of the railway was about twelve kilometers, but until now, the railway embankment had only advanced a distance of five kilometers.

This is also the price of the near-frantic burning operation, a while ago almost half of the labor force was setting fires, and only less than a third of the people led by Cheng Dong worked in shifts at the construction site to build roads.

Therefore, going all out to build the railway has become the number one project at present, but what everyone did not expect is that the remaining mileage of the roadbed took more than 50 days to complete.

The reason is that Chengdong had to improve the engineering standards, because the soil of many sections of the roadbed is very soft, and more than half of the mileage is sandy, so there are higher requirements for the quality of rammed earth and drainage engineering operations.

In the end, Cheng Dong and Hou Xianglin had to take into account the static and dynamic loads of the railway, and made an average embankment slope of half a meter high for the roadbed of the railway, and had to dig drainage ditches on both sides of the slope, and the width of the roadbed was also increased to two meters and a half.

Although these works were not too technically difficult, they greatly increased the amount of earthwork, and the collection of gravel was a very laborious task, but there was no shortage of watery and semi-dry small ditches on the island, and therefore no shortage of river sand and pebbles.

When the first phase of the roadbed was finally completed on April 5, all the men who participated in the construction of the road were exhausted.

The vast majority of people are tired and lose weight, not to mention, everyone's hands are grinding out blood blisters, and there are blood blisters on their feet, and in the end, these have turned into calluses......

During this period, the original plan to give classes to high school students in the evening was also temporarily canceled, because high school students---- in fact, including almost all teachers, were already sore backs and exhausted, so whether it was in class or teaching, they had no intention of doing anything ---- dealing with sleep.

Later, when these people went back to the Red Mansion to rest after work, they didn't drive their respective engineering vehicles back, they were so tired that they almost went back in the tractor trailer driven by Gu Jin and Dai Xiaoshan.

And the first thing I did after returning to the Red Mansion was not to eat, but to take a hot bath, and then fall into bed and sleep before getting up and going to the restaurant......

However, the fruits of hard work were abundant, and on April 20, a standard-gauge railway finally led from the entrance of the cave to the Red Wharf.

It was the first railroad in the New World.

Someone suggested that the fruits of everyone's labor should be named, and after a lot of discussion, the final name of the railway from Dongkou Square to the Red Wharf was called the Red Hole Line, which was not interesting at all, and there was no way, everyone was too tired to think about any tricks in this regard.

On the morning of April 21, 1655, all the traversers arrived at the Red Wharf along the Red Hole Line railway in a four-car wagon pulled by a Stephen 0-4-0 tank-type steam locomotive.

It was the first time in nearly four months that people had returned to the Red Pier, the boat and the pier were still standing quietly on the shore, the waves crashing against the pier and the hull, making a rattling sound, the blue sea and blue sky were still so beautiful, a flock of seabirds hovered leisurely over the masts of the Nicole and Pride, and everything looked as if nothing had happened.

Half an hour later, in full view of everyone, Gu Jin and Li Sanduo quickly climbed up to the deck of the Nicole with the rope soft ladder, they quickly lowered the gangway, and let all the traversers board the deck of the Freedom Wheel Nicole again, and everyone finally returned to the Nicole after nearly four months of crossing to the New World.

At this time, the people who revisited the old place looked at the distance with emotion, just as the so-called fighting stars and moving things are human and wrong, and the day of reunion with this giant ship is already another new world......