It was well after midday by the time we turned the base of the buttress and ground to a halt at the barbed wire. There was nobody on the dam or up at the concrete housing of the hoist. The whole place seemed strangely deserted. We hung about for a time, blowing on the horns and shouting to attract attention. But nobody came and in the end we found a join in the wire, rolled it back and drove the vehicles through. I had taken the precaution of hiding all the rifles under a pile of bedding. The Luger I had slipped into my pocket. The drillers, exhausted and despondent, were in an ugly mood. It only wanted a crack or two from some of the men working on the power house at the bottom of the hoist and there would be trouble. I was taking no chances of it coming to shooting.
We took the vehicle and the cart straight up to the cable terminal. There wasn’t a soul there. Boy went down to the dam and disappeared down concrete steps into the bowels of it. We stood and stared down at the dam, a little bewildered and I think even then with an odd sense of waiting for something. The silence was uncanny. The dam was a flat-topped battlement of concrete flung across the cleft that divided the peaks of Solomon’s Judgment. It was smooth and curved with clean, fresh lines as yet unmarked by weather. On the Thunder Valley side it sloped down like a great wall into the gloom of the cleft. From where we stood we couldn’t see the bottom. It gave me the feeling that it went on dropping down indefinitely till it reached the slide two thousand feet below. On the other side the lake of the Kingdom swept to within a yard or so of the top. The wall of concrete seemed to be leaning into the lake as though straining to hold the weight of the water in check. It was hot in the sunshine as we waited and the air was still, the water lying flat and sultry like a sheet of metal. The noise of water running was the only sound that broke the utter stillness.
Boy came up out of the smooth top of the dam and climbed towards us, a puzzled frown on his suntanned face. ‘Not a soul there,’ he said. ‘And all the sluices are fully open.’
‘Isn’t there a phone down in the control room?’ Jean asked.
Boy nodded. ‘I tried it, but I couldn’t get any answer. It seemed dead.’
We stood there for a moment, talking softly, wondering what to do. At length Garry said, ‘Well anyway, the cage is here. We’d better start loading the first truck.’
As Don moved towards the instrument truck there was a sudden splintering sound and the noise of falling stone. It was followed by a faint shout half-drowned in a roar of water. Then a man came clambering up the sides of the cleft. He was one of the engineers and he was followed by the guards and another engineer. They saw us and came running towards us. Their faces looked white and scared.
‘What’s happened?’ Garry called out.
‘The dam,’ shouted one of the engineers. ‘There’s a crack… It’s leaking… The whole thing will go any minute.’ He was out of breath and his voice was pitched high with fright.
We stared at him, hardly able to comprehend what he was saying — convinced only by the fear on his face.
‘Can’t you relieve the pressure?’ Boy asked.
‘The sluice gates are wide open already.’
‘Have you told them down below?’ Steve Strachan asked him.
‘No. The phone was cut in that storm the night before last. It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do. There are nearly a hundred men working down on the slide where they’re going to build the power house. What can I do?’ He stood there, wringing his hands hopelessly.
‘What about the phone in the cable house?’ I asked.
‘Yes, yes, of course. But I don’t think there’ll be anyone in the lower housing, not until six this evening.’
Everybody was talking at once now and I watched the engineer as he ran stumbling to the cable terminal. If there was nobody at the bottom to get his warning… I looked at the lake. It was six miles or more across and in the centre it would be as deep as the dam was high — over two hundred feet. I thought of the men working down there on the slide, directly in the path of that great sheet of water if the dam collapsed. It would come thundering through the cleft and then fall, millions of tons of it falling two thousand feet; all the water that had fallen on the mountains in twelve hours tumbling over in one great solid sheet. Jean’s hand gripped my arm. ‘What can we do?’ Her voice trembled and I saw by her face that she, too, was picturing that effect of a breach. But the dam looked solid enough. The great sweep of it swung smoothly and uninterruptedly across the cleft. It looked as though it could hold an ocean.
The others were already scrambling down to have a look at the damage. I followed. Johnnie came slithering down with me. And from the top of the dam itself we looked down the smooth face of it to a great jet of water fifty feet long and two or three feet across. It was coming from a jagged rent about halfway down the dam face and all around the hole were great splintering cracks through which the water seeped. Down below at the very foot of the dam the sluice gates added their rush of water.
‘It’s that cement they used on the original dam.’ Johnnie had to shout in my ear to make himself heard above the din of the water. ‘It was old stuff and it’s cracking up. The goldarned fools!’
As we turned away from the appalling sight the engineer who had gone to the hoist to try and telephone came slithering down to us. ‘There’s nobody there,’ he shouted.
‘Can’t you go down and warn them?’ Johnnie asked.
‘There’s nobody down there, I tell you,’ he almost screamed. ‘Nobody hears the telephone. There’s nobody to work the engine.’
I was looking up towards the hoist, remembering the night Jeff and I had examined the cradle together to see if there was a safety device to get the cage down if the engine packed up. ‘How long before this dam goes?’ I asked the engineer.
‘I don’t know. It may go any minute. It may last till we have drained the lake.’
‘It won’t do that. Look.’ Johnnie was peering over the edge, pointing to the great thundering jet of brownish water. It had increased in size appreciably in the last few minutes.
The American newspaper correspondent came along the top of the dam towards us. He had been out in the centre with his photographer who was taking pictures regardless of the danger. ‘Why don’t these guys do something — about the boys down below I mean?’
‘What can we do?’ the engineer demanded petulantly. ‘We’ve no phone, no means of communicating.’
I called to Boy and together we climbed the side of the cleft to the hoist. Jean caught up with us just as I was climbing into the cage. ‘What are you going to do?’ I was already looking up at the cradle, seeing what I needed to knock the pins out that secured the driving cable to it. Her hand gripped my arm. ‘No. For God’s sake, darling. You can’t. They’ll be all right. They’ll have seen that flow of water coming down-’
‘If they have then I’ll stop the cage on the lip of the fault.’ I gently disengaged her fingers. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll be all right.’ She stared at me, her face suddenly white. I think she knew as well as I did that the chances of the men working down there having noticed an increase in the flow of water from the dam were remote. ‘Why you?’ she whispered. ‘Why not one of the men who belong to the dam? It’s their responsibility.’
I turned away and climbed into the cage. I couldn’t explain to her why it was better for me to go. ‘Hand me that bit of timber, Boy.’ He passed it up and I knocked the pins out. As the last one fell to the floor I had my hand on the brake lever. The driving cable dropped free on to the rollers and the cage began to move. I hauled down on the lever and brought the bottom braking wheel into action, forcing the suspension cable up between the two travelling wheels.
‘Okay, let’s go,’ Boy said.
I turned to find Jean clambering into the cage. ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried.