[al:新概念英语（三）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（英音）] [ti:Back in the Old Country] [by:更多学习内容，请到yingyu.chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [00:01.50]Lesson 57 [00:03.54]Back in the old country [00:12.65]Did the narrater find his mother's grave? [00:18.18]I stopped to let the car cool off and to study the map. [00:22.74]I had expected to be near my objective by now, but everything still seemed alien to me. [00:29.09]I was only five when my father had taken me abroad, and that was eighteen years ago. [00:35.66]When my mother had died after a tragic accident, he did not quickly recover from the shock and loneliness. [00:43.50]Everything around him was full of her presence, continually reopening the wound. [00:49.58]So he decided to emigrate. [00:52.06]In the new country he became absorbed in making a new life for the two of us, so that he gradually ceased to grieve. [01:00.53]He did not marry again and I was brought up without a woman's care; [01:05.56]but I lacked for nothing, for he was both father and mother to me. [01:10.71]He always meant to go back one day, but not to stay. [01:14.80]His roots and mine had become too firmly embedded in the new land. [01:20.03]But he wanted to see the old folk againand to visit my mother's grave. [01:25.18]He became mortally ill a few months before we had planned to go and, when he knew that he was dying, he made me promise to go on my own. [01:34.85]I hired a car the day after landing and bought a comprehensive book of maps, [01:40.32]which I found most helpful on the cross-country journey, but which I did not think I should need on the last stage. [01:48.05]It was not that I actually remembered anything at all. [01:51.41]But my father had described over and over again what we should see at every milestone after leaving the nearest town, [01:59.86]so that I was positive I should recognize it as familiar territory. [02:04.87]Well, I had been wrong, for I was now lost. [02:09.94]I looked at the map and then at the milometer. [02:13.52]I had come ten miles since leaving the town and at this point, according to my father, [02:20.09]I should be looking at farms and cottages in a valley, [02:23.57]with the spire of the church of our village showing in the far distance. [02:28.47]I could see no valley, no farms, no cottages and no church spire-only a lake. [02:36.71]I decided that I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere. [02:40.94]So I drove back to the town and began to retrace the route, taking frequent glances at the map. [02:48.24]I landed up at the same corner. [02:51.50]The curious thing was that the lake was not marked on the map. [02:56.28]I felt as if I had stumbled into a nightmare country, as you sometimes do in dreams. [03:02.48]And, as in a nightmare, there was nobody in sight to help me. [03:07.01]Fortunately for me, as I was wondering what to do next, [03:11.00]there appeared on the horizon a man on horseback, riding in my direction. [03:16.72]I waited till he came near, then I asked him the way to our old village. [03:22.56]He said that there was now no village. [03:26.05]I thought he must have misunderstood me, so I repeated its name. [03:30.87]This time he pointed to the lake. [03:34.02]The village no longer existed because it had been submerged, and all the valley too. [03:41.37]The lake was not a natural one, but a man-made reservoir.