Soon we could no longer walk side by side, for the tunnel began to narrow, with many sharp rocks protruding. Gordon was in the lead and had become more cautious, pausing every few moments and peering ahead. I walked a couple of paces behind.
This single-file advance went on for about a hundred yards into the mountain. The tunnel widened again and we could see the rock face where the work had stopped. A dozen wheelbarrows, some of them full of gravel and ore, had been left by the fleeing miners. In the light of the bulbs, veins of gold gleamed in the half-excavated wall. Power drills and discarded shovels lay around.
Gordon Smith stopped beside one of the wheelbarrows. He bent over it and began to trowel up some of the smaller pieces of ore into his shoulder bag. All at once, he stiffened and then straightened up, head cocked, as though to listen to something.
The little hairs on my neck tingled.
He was about ten feet away and had begun to make a peculiar, growling sort of noise. He turned very slowly towards me.
The face that looked at me was no longer Gordon Smith’s but rather seemed like parts of a number of faces superimposed on one another, with noses, mouths, and ears all misplaced and distorted. A huge pair of eyes dominated in the midst of that awful face, bulging and cold like a predator’s.
I knew this transformation was illogical and impossible, but my heart was pounding nonetheless. I tried to say something when the thing that had replaced Gordon Smith started to shuffle towards me with its claws reaching out.
That was enough for me. I threw my shovel and pickaxe at it then turned and ran as fast as I could. The thing scuttled along behind me, its breath rasping horribly. When I reached the narrower part of the tunnel, I had to slow up because of the protruding rocks. I was terrified it might catch up to me, but it too was having trouble avoiding the rocks. At last, glimmerings of daylight appeared ahead. I raced round the final corner of the tunnel and out into the open air.
The thing was right on my heels. I could run no more, so I turned with my fists raised, ready to defend myself to the death.
The monster slouched over in front of me, gasping, was Gordon Smith. He was the only living creature around, aside from myself, and he was trying to smile.
BACK AT THE big bungalow, I drank some coffee and gradually got my nerve back. The general manager, like me, was wondering what exactly had happened. Gordon looked at me.
“I was taking a sample of some of the ore and I turned to ask you for the shovel,” he said. “To put it mildly, you didn’t look at all like yourself. In fact your face was so ugly, it frightened the wits out of me. You threw your tools at me as though you wanted to kill me, then you turned and ran. So I just grabbed my sample bag and ran out after you. See, this is where you hit me with your shovel.”
He slowly unbuttoned his shirt and we could see, on the left side of his chest, a red and purple welt. He flexed his left shoulder gently and winced. “This is real enough, anyway,” he said.
I was shocked that I’d done this to him. I told him he’d seemed to me to be transformed into something awful and I’d only been defending myself.
Gordon addressed himself now to the general manager.
“Clearly we both experienced some kind of hallucination,” he said. He took out the ticking instrument that had been in his backpack. The arrow on one of the dials pointed at a red zone. “You see, it’s registering a high quantity of some kind of gas other than methane or carbon monoxide or any of the usual things you find in mines. My guess is it’s from some vegetable component in the rock. The miners may have released it into the air when they were boring deeper inside the mountain. If so, it’ll be in the rock samples I brought out.
“If I’m right, there’s no miracle involved. Though whether you’ll be able to convince your miners of that is another problem.”
“Claro,” the general manager said.
Throughout, Gordon Smith had seemed more amused than anything else about what had happened. I really had thought he’d somehow been turned into a monster.
“For a moment, I thought the same about you, too,” he said. “But I knew that couldn’t be. One of the advantages of being a scientist is that we’re loath to consider the impossible as the cause of anything.”
As for me, I should have been reassured by his rational explanation of the event, sitting there in the orderly calm of the bungalow, with a cup of coffee in my hand and the sound of birds through the screens. But I wasn’t quite at ease. The entire incident reminded me of too many weird things I’d come across — in the Tollgate, in Duncairn, and in Africa — that never seemed quite resolved by common sense.
LATER THAT DAY when the rocks were analyzed in the mine laboratory, Gordon found traces in them, in various concentrations, of a hallucinogen.
“It has the same makeup as various peyote mushrooms,” he told me and the manager. “Perhaps they were petrified in some ancient upheaval of the earth in this region. The original inhabitants may have stumbled on this place, had their visions, and decided the mountain was holy.”
Now he got down to business. He recommended that the manager advise the owners to invest in a ventilator system. Smith’s Pumps would, of course, be happy to custom-build one for them. In the meantime, the wearing of oxygen masks by the miners would be adequate protection.
Even as he talked about business matters, I could still catch glimpses in his face of that monstrous image I’d seen in the cave. And from his sideways glances, I knew he could still see aspects of it in me.
We even joked about it.
But I wondered if perhaps we’d each seen a truth about the other, the kind of truth no one would want to believe about himself. And, having seen it, would two people ever be able to look at each other in the same old, relatively innocent way?
At any rate, the next morning, he took a jeep to the little airfield. From there he’d fly to the capital, and then on, back to Canada. The last thing he said to me was that he hoped we’d meet again.
GORDON SMITH’S scientific analysis made no difference to the fate of the mine. In the weeks that followed his departure, the unscientific view of the incident spread and intensified. It was believed that any miner who went down into the La Mancha mine, and any gold extracted from it, would be accursed. The owners went so far as to hire a local shaman to come and perform some ceremonies to placate or exorcise the spirits. But that did nothing to reassure the miners. So eventually it was decided that the entrances to all three tunnels should be dynamited over and the workers deployed to other mines.
Almost overnight, the shantytown that had grown up around La Mancha was depopulated. The townspeople were now convinced that after the shaman’s intervention some of the mountain spirits might flee the mine and, instead, take up residence in the town.
One way or another, “ghost town” soon became an apt description of that collection of shacks.
MY TUTORING TOOK ME to other mines. But those few moments of terror down the La Mancha tunnel had a lasting, if not permanent, effect on me. Certainly, from that point in my life I felt I became less naive about people, less reliant on first impressions.
Which, surely, was a good thing.
4
InterMinas had sent me to tutor a group of administrators at the Segura strip mine, which was located in a low-lying region of thick jungle. I’d been warned that the climate there was very humid and especially hard on gringos. After a few weeks, just when I was congratulating myself on my strong constitution, I suddenly came down with a high fever and upset stomach. Within a day or two, I’d developed severe pains in all my muscles and a severe rash.