When the Mountain Sweats

Chapter One: The Man in the Yard

The trestle at kilometre nine had been condemned by every honest man who ever looked at it, and Francis Bramley had signed it fit for traffic four times.

He lay on his back on the ballast under the third bent, ninety feet of eucalyptus and iron above him, and listened to the timber talk. That was all inspection amounted to now. A loaded ore train would come down off the shoulder at eleven, and the whole spidery structure would groan like a ship, and the sound it made would tell him whether it meant to stand another month. He had a notebook in his breast pocket and a flat bottle of cane spirit in his hip pocket, and by the time the train came the notebook was still empty.

He was thirty-four. He had been, once, the best levelling man between Arequipa and the lake, and he had a certificate from the Institution of Civil Engineers in a tin trunk to prove it, and he no longer took it out.

The train came. The bridge shrieked, dropped an inch and a half at the fourth bent, and shook a fine snow of rust down onto his face. The ore cars went over slowly, one, two, nine of them, and then the noise ran away downhill and the wind came back, the eternal wind of the puna, dry as an oven, carrying grit and the smell of the roasting yard: sulphur, and under the sulphur that sweetish metal smell that got into a man's teeth.

Francis rolled over, spat, and wrote: *Bent 4 settling. Timber sound. Fit for present traffic.*

A lie of the ordinary kind. He had told a much larger one three years ago, and it had cost a village a river.

He walked back into Tunquipata along the rails. The company town lay in a saucer of yellow grass at fourteen thousand feet: forty tin roofs, a chapel, a store, a hospital with no doctor in it, the long adobe sheds of the roasting yard, and the black slag hills that had once been a hillside. The mountain behind it all was called Wanka Punta, and it had silver in it, and cinnabar under the silver, and the company took both and turned one into the other's poison.

The sun was going when he reached his gate. There were three men in his yard, and a fourth on the ground.

The three were muleteers: hard, small, patient men in wool and rawhide, their animals standing head-down behind them with the sweat drying white on their flanks. They had come a long way. The man on the ground was wrapped in a poncho and a company coat, and Francis knew before he crouched what he was looking at, because he had seen it a hundred times in the roasting yard.

The man's gums were black. His teeth were gone but for three, and his hands, folded on his chest, would not stop moving — a small continuous shiver, like a bird's heart. Mercury. Quicksilver. The trembles, the men called it. He looked seventy and was probably thirty-five.

"Where did you get him?" Francis asked in Spanish.

"Above the lagoons. Six days." The eldest muleteer tipped his chin eastward, at the wall of the cordillera going purple in the last light. "He was walking. Then he was not walking."

"Why bring him here? There's a hospital at the yard—"

"He said a name." The muleteer's eyes were flat and careful. "An English name, over and over. Bramley. Everyone knows there is one Englishman in Tunquipata who is not a manager."

Francis's mouth went dry in a way the bottle had nothing to do with. He knelt and took the man's shoulder.

"Gareth," he said. "Did he say Gareth?"

The man's eyes opened. They were yellow at the edges and perfectly aware.

"Bramley," he whispered.

"I'm Bramley. Francis Bramley. My brother is Gareth Bramley. Is he—"

The man's shaking hand crawled inside the coat and came out with something. He would not let go of it. Francis had to lift the man's whole arm to see: a tin, a little flat tobacco tin, the seam soldered shut all round with a clumsy grey bead.

"Domingo Ayala," the man said. "Surveyor. Third class. Company." He said it the way a soldier gives his number, and Francis understood that he had been saying it to himself for six days to stay a person and not a bundle on a mule.

Francis carried him inside. He weighed nothing. Francis laid him on his own cot, gave the muleteers money and a bottle, and boiled water because it was the only useful thing he knew how to do. Ayala took two spoonfuls of tea and shivered and talked, and Francis, kneeling with a candle, learned in ninety minutes more than he had learned in two years of writing letters that were never answered.

Ayala had been sent out eleven months before with two peons and instructions from the district agent to survey a line east of the lagoons — a line, he said, that went nowhere and served nothing, into country the company had no concession over. They had crossed the white salt pan. They had found a pass. They had found, in a wall of blue ice, a hole.

"A door," Ayala said. "Cut stone in the ice. Men made it." His eyes rolled toward the candle. "There was no water coming out. That is the only reason I am alive to be dying."

"You went in."

"Two days in. Three days. There is a road inside, señor. A road for water and for men both, cut and fitted, going up. My peons would not go past the second chamber. I went alone and I came back alone." He coughed. It went on a long time. "They took my report in the office and gave me eight soles and sent me to the roasting yard as a checker. Eleven months in the vapour. That is what they gave me." His hand tightened on the tin. "So I stole it back."

"Stole what?"

"What I found in the second chamber. It was in a niche with three little cups. An offering." He was smiling, black-gummed, awful. "I did not put it in my report."

Francis got the tin open with a knife, sawing at the solder while the candle guttered and Ayala's breath rattled.

Inside, folded in oiled cloth, were two things.

The first was a leaf torn from a field notebook, and Francis's hands stopped working when he saw it, because he knew the hand — the narrow upright letters, the little squared-off sevens. Gareth had learned to write those sevens from their father.

*Second attempt at the mouth 14 Sept. Dry. If we are wrong about the season we will not be wrong twice. F. would say the levels are impossible. F. would be wrong.*

And under it, small, as if the man had not wanted to write it at all: *If this reaches Francis — I am not lost. I have gone in.*

The second thing was a plate of silver about the size of a playing card, hammered thin, soft as lead at the edges where a knife had once tested it. Someone had scratched a map into it. Not a map as Francis made maps. A line of dots, a wide blank oval hatched with cross-strokes, a wedge with a notch in it, and at the end of the line a small tidy spiral, deeply cut, like the shell of a snail.

And along the bottom edge, a row of little vertical marks in groups, and a wavy line under them, and it broke off in the middle of a group because the plate had been cut in two. The edge was not torn. It had been sheared clean, deliberately, a long time ago.

"Half," Francis said.

"Half," Ayala agreed.

"Where's the rest?"

Ayala laughed, and the laugh turned into a noise Francis did not want to hear again.

"Señor. Listen. Listen to me now, because I have nobody else and no time." His hand came up and found Francis's collar and pulled with the surprising strength of the very ill. "The road inside goes up to a gate. Water gate. Stone. I saw the marks of the water on the roof of the third chamber and they are as high as a house." He was whispering. "It does not open for a key. It opens when the mountain sweats. When the ice runs, the gate opens and the road becomes the river, and everything in it goes out of that mouth into the sky. You go in before. Before the mountain sweats. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Do not go alone. Nobody goes there alone. Find the one who was thrown out — the guide. He is here. He is in the yard, sweeping, with the rest of the dead men." His grip loosened. "Mayta."

"Mayta," Francis repeated.

"Mayta," said Domingo Ayala, surveyor, third class, and shut his eyes, and about an hour later he stopped shaking, which was the first rest he had had in a year.

Francis sat by the cot till dawn with the silver plate in his hand, turning it so the candlelight ran along the scratches, and for the first time in three years he did not touch the bottle in his coat, because his hands, all at once, had something better to do.