When I was an elementary school student, we had an aerial photograph of our house hanging in the guest room. For the town's history records or something similar, they would take photos every few years and sell them to families who wanted them. Right next to our house was a mountain, and we occasionally hired contractors to clear weeds and trim the trees. Snakes came out, monkeys came out—just assume it was the middle of nowhere.
Now for the main story. During summer break when I was in elementary school, my cousin and I played in that mountain. It was cool even during the day, and we climbed trees and played hide-and-seek. Eventually, we started heading up toward the peak. Though I call it a mountain, it was barely fifty meters high; it might be better described as a small patch of woods. Naturally, there were no paths, so we climbed while dodging trees.
Just as we were almost at the top, about ten meters to the side, there was a depressed area that looked like a cliff. As the two of us wandered over toward it, we saw the surface of a body of water down below. It was past noon, and the water's surface was gleaming gold in the western sun.
"I wonder if there was always a pond around here?" we thought. But a thing was a thing. In the areas shadowed by the trees, there were swarms of fish shadows. However, there was no way down. Even when we walked along the edge of the cliff, the cliff itself sloped inward like an overhang, making it impossible to descend. Yet, right beside the pond, there was a single set of footprints.
My cousin and I both got a weird feeling of dread and bolted out of the mountain at full speed. You can probably guess the punchline, but even when we looked at the aerial photograph, no pond was shown on it. When I asked my parents, they wouldn't take me seriously, saying there was no way a pond like that could exist.
Later, when I talked about it to my great-grandfather, who was still alive at the time, he gave me a concise and convincing reply: "Ah, that's the forest god's pond." It seemed my great-grandfather had also seen that pond once, but he wouldn't go into detail. All he said with a laugh was, "I saw the god, you know. Good thing I didn't go blind. Wahahaha."
Anyway, thanks for the replies, I learned a lot! Is it kind of like the shifting lakes of the Tarim River?! Still, what remains mysterious to me is that depression itself. There was an elliptical depression about 10 to 12 meters in diameter, and the pond was about 7 or 8 meters down below it. The depth seemed to be around 3 or 4 meters. At least, that's what I thought when I was a kid. Looking back now, it might have been even smaller. However, no trees were growing in that spot, and the open sky was visible right above it. It should have shown up on the aerial photograph, and I went into the mountain several times after that, but I was never able to find even a trace of it. I think I'll just leave it in my mind as the "forest god's pond."
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