He looked about fifty, of middling height, with thin, grey hair swept back. There was something hawkish about his face, with bent nose, noticeable eyebrows, and eyes that took in everything as he walked past — including my little classroom and me, looking out at him. He had a neatness about him, not just because of his spotless tropical whites but in his entire bearing. In this part of the world where everything tended to be sweaty and sloppy and ready to revert at the first opportunity to chaos, he seemed utterly in control of himself.
One of the students in my class that day was the mine office clerk. He told me that the man passing by was the Canadian engineer, Gordon Smith. Smith had been visiting another mine in the region when InterMinas asked him to help with a problem that had arisen. He had a special knowledge of the conditions at La Mancha, for his firm had supplied its specially built pumps.
I remembered the big crate the Charybdis had picked up on Isla Perdida and the stencilled name on its side. Could this man be that Smith?
“That’s right,” said the student. “Señor Smith, of Smith’s Pumps.”
I’D ALREADY HEARD about the problem Smith was being consulted on. In fact it had been the talk of my students for a week now, and had to do with the location of the La Mancha mine. The mine workings were at the base of a low mountain, only a thousand feet high. The mountain seemed misplaced in a region of flat swamplands and thick jungle. It had even been designated a holy place by the traditional forest people. None of these original inhabitants were around anymore, though. They’d long ago been wiped out by tuberculosis, syphilis, and the usual cluster of imported diseases for which they’d no resistance, as well as by alcohol, which to them was just as deadly.
This mountain lay right on top of the La Mancha mine. Three crude tunnels had been burrowed a hundred feet deep into the earth beneath it. The first two tunnels were no longer in production — the vein of gold in them was exhausted. The third, most recent tunnel was still quite profitable. Then the problem arose.
An early sign that something wasn’t right was the exodus of all the bats and cave iguanas that had taken up residence in the tunnel, as they always did at these jungle mines. The tunnel was a half-mile long when the animals disappeared. Then one day, shortly after the morning shift had begun blasting a new section, the miners themselves came rushing up out of the tunnel in a panic. They’d been attacked by “evil spirits,” they said — the old forest people who’d once worshipped in this area must have laid a curse. The miners refused to go back down, despite threats of firings.
One of the foremen, a tough old Argentine named Juarez who’d been in the administration office at the time of the panic, volunteered to go down on his own. He wasn’t at all superstitious and would show the men there was nothing to worry about. The miners stood watching at a distance as Juarez entered the mine. They didn’t have to watch long. After a few minutes, they heard a scream and saw Juarez come stumbling back out of the tunnel entrance. His eyes were wild and he kept glancing back over his shoulder as though being pursued by something awful.
The general manager now had no option but to suspend all work. He got in touch with InterMinas headquarters and was told the Canadian engineer, Gordon Smith, would come to the mine and diagnose the problem.
THE NIGHT OF SMITH’S arrival, the general manager asked me to a special dinner with his visitor, who was staying in the guest room at the big bungalow. I was surprised at the invitation and delighted at the prospect of a good meal.
Around seven, I went over to the bungalow and met Gordon Smith formally. His eyes were shrewd and his handshake firm. As we sipped aperitifs and chatted before dinner, he said he’d spotted me in my classroom when he’d arrived and had asked the general manager who I was.
“I told him he should invite you over for dinner,” he said. “I didn’t want the entire evening to be nothing but business.” From close up, his face was a mesh of tiny wrinkles — like one of those paintings that look solid from a distance. And his brilliant blue eyes had, perhaps, a certain weariness behind their gleam.
I thanked him for asking me to dinner and mentioned the curious coincidence of seeing his name on wooden crates a thousand miles away on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. I also told him I’d heard of the town of Camberloo, too, before seeing it on the crates, for I’d met a doctor who had trained at the university there. It was as though there must be some other law of gravity that brought certain people together, from halfway round the world, in a most unlikely way.
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said with a little smile. “It’s just that the world’s not so immense as we sometimes think.”
I mentioned Dupont’s name in case he might know him. But he shook his head.
“I can’t say I’ve heard of him,” he said. “Though, who knows, I may have passed him often enough on the street.”
He spoke in the calmest of voices and looked so neat I felt refreshed by his presence. In the jungle, I’d become accustomed to passionate outbursts and extravagant displays of emotion over even the most trivial of matters. Clearly, it would take a lot to ruffle Gordon Smith’s composure.
We talked for a while about Scotland. He asked this and that about my life in Glasgow and told me that, like many early Canadians, his ancestors had been exiled from the Highlands several generations back. But although he’d travelled widely he’d never been to the land of his forebears.
I wasn’t ready for his next question.
“Are Scots trustworthy?”
Some of them were bound to be, I said, meaning to be amusing.
He didn’t smile but just watched me with those hawk eyes so that I began to feel less than comfortable. I was relieved when the general manager, who’d been in another room answering the telephone, came back in. He asked Smith if he’d any preliminary notions about this problem at La Mancha.
“Well, I’ve heard what some of the men have reported,” said Smith. “I’ll have to go down the mine myself and find out whether there’s a scientific explanation for what happened.”
The general manager looked surprised.
“Señor Smith, you’re a scientist,” he said. “Could there be an unscientific explanation?”
“I’m a scientist by training — that doesn’t mean I’m a cynic,” said Gordon Smith. “Anyway, after the discovery of quantum physics, scientists should perhaps be more open-minded.” He looked at me. “I’ve seen so many weird things in my travels, I’m not superstitious about not being superstitious.”
I had to think about that one — my father would have enjoyed the double negative.
THE DINNER OF pineapple chicken was excellent and the wine tasted good. The general manager had other business to attend to and excused himself right after the coconut cream dessert.
Gordon Smith and I stayed at the dinner table for a while longer, but he didn’t drink much. I made up for that and, inspired by the wine, I needed no encouragement to talk. Before long I was telling him all about Duncairn and Miriam Galt and my broken heart. How I often dreamt about her, and when I woke to her absence, it was as if my heart had been broken again.
“These matters of the heart can be so complicated, especially when you’re young,” said Gordon Smith. “I hope in time you’ll get over her.”
We sat silent for a few moments, then again he said something unexpected.
“I’ve never been much of a dreamer myself,” he said. “I used to think that was good. I was under the impression that when you dream, you see the world the way a madman sees it. So maybe it’s better not to dream in case the dreams, or nightmares, or whatever they are, start to affect your waking life.”