The Cuervo Eleven

Chapter One: The Cage

The Cuervo mine sat at fourteen thousand feet, in a cold that came up through the boot soles and stayed in the bones all day. Nothing grew there but a grey cushion moss the miners called old man's beard, and the wind off the glacier came down the valley twice a day like something let off a chain.

Morgan Hopkin had been three years at that altitude and had learned to sleep with his mouth open and to think slowly. He was twenty-five. He was the company's blasting engineer, which meant that of the two hundred and forty men on the mountain he was the one who decided where the rock would break and how hard. He was good at it. He was better at it than any man the Cuervo Consolidated Mining Company had sent out before, and the manager, a dry Cornishman named Trethowan, had told him so in the flat way of a man not paying a compliment but noting an asset.

The fire started on the twelfth of October, 1899, at about twenty minutes past ten in the morning, in the timbered gallery of the four hundred station.

Hopkin was at the four hundred when it started. He had come down at six to load a round in the Santa Bárbara drift and had stayed to argue with the timber boss about a set of props that had begun to bow. The Cuervo shaft was a vertical steel-guided hoisting shaft, two hundred metres, four hundred, six hundred, with a manway ladder running alongside it in its own compartment, and every station opened into galleries cribbed and lagged with eucalyptus brought up from the warm country at ruinous cost. The wood was dry as a bone at that altitude. Everybody knew it. Everybody had known it for nine years and nothing had ever come of the knowing.

He heard the first shout as a change in the ordinary noise. The four hundred station was always loud — the rattle of the ore chutes, the slam of the cage doors, men calling in Quechua and Spanish and the odd word of English — and then all of it stopped at once, which was worse than any shout.

A man came out of the west gallery running with his hat in his hand. Behind him the air had gone the colour of weak tea.

"Fuego," he said. "Los maderos."

Hopkin remembered afterwards that his first thought was entirely practical, and that he was proud of it for perhaps two seconds. Timber fire in a cribbed gallery, and the shaft above it acting like a chimney flue, drawing hard. He turned to the station bell and rang for the cage.

It was already coming. The cage came down out of the dark with its chain slapping, and men were pouring out of the west gallery now, ten, twelve, fifteen of them, some with tools still in their hands, one with his lamp still burning as though he intended to go back for something. Hopkin got the door open. He put men in. He counted them in, because counting was what he did.

Eight was the number. The Cuervo cage was rated for eight and had carried eleven when the shift bosses were in a hurry, but it had a steel roof-bar you could hang from and a floor that could take a crowd if the crowd stood still.

He had eight in and room, if he wanted it, for three more.

Smoke came out of the west gallery in a slow rolling wall, low along the roof at first and then dropping, and the temperature of the air changed against his face, not hot yet but wrong, dry and sweetish with burning resin. Somebody in the cage was praying out loud. Somebody else was saying, over and over, that his brother was in the winze.

And Hopkin heard the ladder.

The manway compartment was three feet from where he stood, boarded off from the shaft, and it carried sound the way a speaking tube does. He heard boots on rungs. He heard the particular hollow knock of a man climbing fast with something in one hand, and he heard voices — two, three, more — coming up from the six hundred, and one of them was young and it was shouting a name.

They were perhaps twenty seconds below him. Perhaps thirty.

He knew that. He knew it the way he knew the burning rate of a fuse, which is to say exactly, in his body, without needing to think. Twenty seconds. He had room for three. The smoke was at the level of his chest and the draw of the shaft would take it up past the two hundred in another minute and the cage was standing there with the door open and the bell rope in his hand.

Four seconds.

He has counted them since, over and over, and they always come out at four. One: he looked at the manway boards. Two: something went through him that was not thought at all, that was older than thought, a cold flooding thing that started in his groin and went up the back of his neck and had no words in it, only a single flat instruction. Three: his hand closed on the rope. Four: he pulled it three times.

The cage jerked. A man in the back said, wait, wait, there are men on the ladder, and Hopkin said nothing at all, and the four hundred station dropped away below them into brown air, and by the two hundred the smoke was thinner, and at the collar the cold hit them like a bucket of water and the sky was that hard Andean blue with a few white clouds standing over the glacier, absolutely unchanged.

Huw Bethell, the winchman, was leaning out of the winch-house door with his face grey. "How many below?"

"Send it down," Hopkin said. "Send it down again."

They sent it down. They sent it down four times. The third time it came up with the paint blistered and the wooden floor charred through in one corner and nobody in it, and the fourth time the guide ropes had gone and the cage came up crabbing and screeching against the timbers, and Trethowan, who had run up from the office with his coat unbuttoned, took the signal cord out of Hopkin's hand and said that was enough, they would lose the shaft and the winch and the men on top too.

They put a fan at the collar and blew air down and the mountain breathed smoke at them for nineteen hours.

Eleven men did not come up.

The list was written out in the assay office that night on a sheet of foolscap and pinned to the door of the company store, and Hopkin read it standing in the wind with his hands in his pockets, and read it again the next morning, and could have recited it at any point for the rest of his life.

Rufino Cruz, shift foreman, forty-four. Emilio Cano, timberman, nineteen. And nine more.

On the third day a boy came out of the old drainage adit, half a mile down the mountain, on his hands and knees, into the light. He was seventeen years old and his name was Julio Cano, and he had been on the ladder below the four hundred station, and he had been behind his brother, and his brother had stopped to help a man with a crushed foot, and Julio had gone on up and had found the station empty and the cage gone and the manway full of smoke coming down at him like water going the wrong way.

He went back down. He got as far as the six hundred. He never found Emilio. He found the drainage adit because a dead man's lamp was lying in the mouth of it, and he crawled a thousand yards in the dark on a floor of cold running water, and when he came out into the sun it burned the surface of both his eyes, and for the rest of his life he wore blue spectacles in daylight and could not read a page without holding it close.

Hopkin was among the men who carried him down to the infirmary. The boy's hands had no skin left on the palms. He was very light. He kept asking, in a voice worn down to almost nothing, whether the cage had come.

"Yes," Hopkin said. "The cage came."

He would have given, in the years afterwards, everything he owned and both his arms to have that sentence back.