When Fatty mentioned he found the entrance to Insect Valley, Shirley Yang and I raised our binoculars to look in the direction he pointed. In the distance, we spotted a large patch of wild flowering trees with yellow and white blooms. Among the flowers, swarms of golden swallowtail butterflies flitted about. These butterflies were quite large, flying in groups and never straying far from the flowering trees.
Shirley Yang exclaimed, “Those flowers must be butterfly orchids! I can’t believe they’ve attracted so many golden swallowtails… and even golden-banded butterflies… and look, there are rare golden-lined butterflies too! It’s just like the golden leaves in the gardens of the gods in ancient Greek myths, blown by the sea breeze in the Aegean Sea.”
I knew nothing about butterflies, and after looking through the binoculars for a while, I still couldn’t see any valleys or streams—just the butterflies and wildflower trees. The vegetation was so thick that it completely obscured the terrain. From above, everything looked like a dense mass of plants typical of the Tropic of Cancer, very different from the original forests of the Greater Khingan Range.