When Detlef saw the photographs of the site he had to admit that he had been overly optimistic. Detlef felt a bit depressed, while at the other end of the e-mail Jung-hsiang Li was still bursting with confidence. Engineers like Jung-hsiang Li, and the whole Taiwanese project team in fact, showed an amazing determination to “see the tunnel through.” Detlef fairly admired them for it, but at the same time, inexplicably, it frightened him.
Driving through the tunnel decades later, Detlef lowered the window to get an exact sense of the wind, temperature and artificial lighting inside. At the time, the workers had spent over a decade in a dark, dank cave that was cold in winter and muggy in summer. And the engineering team was up against Tertiary sedimentary rock, interorogenic fold and thrust belts, interstitial water trapped in the earth for tens of thousands of years, strike-slip faults, local normal faults, and eleven folded structures of varying dimensions. The tunnel was a great triumph, wasn’t it? Or had it all been an unnecessary waste? Detlef wanted to find a chance to ask Jung-hsiang Li how he felt about it now.
When he was younger Detlef would have described it as a triumph, no question about it. But these past few years he was not so sure. Now he often told his classes that each mountain had its own unique “heart.” “According to the data we had at the time,” he would say, “the infrastructural authority had dug fifty-nine trial boreholes, seven trial trenches and conducted twelve seismic profiles. It was a large-scale geological survey, but as a way of plumbing the heart of such a huge mountain as this it was all just speculative ‘dream interpretation.’ ”
Detlef would play footage of groundwater flooding the tunnel as a lecture supplement. That always made a big impression: with over seven hundred liters per second of groundwater flowing in, it was almost as if the mountain had resolved to get rid of the people who were probing its heart, for once and for all.
“You don’t get drowned ‘inside’ a mountain every day, now do you?” Detlef tapped the hollow-sounding lectern with his digital pointer. These new lecterns felt none too stable when he leaned on them. The solid wood lecterns they used to have were extremely heavy. It was always like this now: no attention to detail.
“My job is to design a tool that will bore through the ‘heart’ of a mountain.” Detlef looked his students in the eyes one by one. “But now I sometimes have my doubts. I wonder whether we shouldn’t just go around, especially when it’s a hill with a particularly complicated core. Going through a mountain to get from place to place as quickly as possible is one way of life, while going around is another. We thought we were making a scientific judgment, but actually we were making a lifestyle choice.”
Hearing such an accomplished professor express such sentiments, students were often speechless.
“Saving time apparently reduces certain costs, but actually the government had to put all that money into the project in the first place. Sometimes when you calculate the net effect it’s not necessarily worth it.”
“In that case, you’re out of work,” a smart alec would sometimes comment.
“Maybe I’d change occupation,” Detlef would reply. “Maybe I’d work as a dairy farmer or something like that. My father was a dairy farmer. We should all be able to think of another way to make a living, right?” He was sometimes not willing to admit how much he’d been influenced by Sara in saying such things.
One time Sara brought up an issue he had never considered before. For such a colossal undertaking, putting large numbers of personnel to work in a hellish environment, the technical difficulty of the project was not the only issue. The subtleties of human psychology seemed more important. Did the agency in charge of the project factor in the pressure put in one way or another on the people involved in its implementation? Were the workers, though unsung, given a hero’s reward? Or did they make just barely enough to put food on the table?
Detlef sighed. “But on any project engineers like us are nothing more than moles. If I don’t drill, someone else will,” Professor Boldt said, both to the students sitting below and to Sara.
Detlef would never forget what had brought him to Taiwan in the first place: after the TBM on the westbound tunnel had gotten stuck for the tenth time they’d determined that the cause might be muck flooding the body of the machine. Jung-hsiang Li and his elder brother Jung-chin filled him in on the details of the disastrous turn of events in the car. Jung-hsiang was newly married, Jung-chin single, but they were both outstanding tunneling engineers. They even looked alike: they both had single-fold eyelids and thinning hair, were of medium height and wore dark brown square-frame sunglasses and the same style of work coat.
“Another dozen or so concrete reinforcement rings buckled, groundwater was gushing in again from the side, there were constant localized collapses, and the TBM started making a deafening thudding sound. We sent some people forward to spray concrete into the groundwater outlet, but the water pressure was too great. Must have been ten minutes later when we had the first power outage, which probably lasted a minute. When the power came back on there were rocks falling, and even small rocks hitting the ground caused quite an echo. I immediately ordered an evacuation. Aye, it was total chaos in there,” Jung-hsiang said.
“Then I heard two pops in quick succession, like fractures in the bedrock. That scared the hell out of me. Not really able to see where I was going, I fell against the lowest rung of the TBM and gashed my calf. I picked myself up and sprinted toward the entrance. We barely made it out alive. There were successive collapses, and within twenty-four hours all the work we’d done had vanished,” said Jung-chin Li.
“Might have been a water-resistant layer above the hard rock stratum, formed by millions of years of ground stress. If so, the high-pressure water seam burst when the TBM breached it, causing the collapse,” said Jung-hsiang. Listening to the brothers’ explanation, Detlef tried to imagine what had happened in the “heart” of the mountain and what damage the TBM had likely sustained.
“Thank God we made it out alive.”
“You can say that again,” said Jung-chin. “If you believe in God.”
People who have never visited the heart of a mountain will never know how complicated and capricious it can be. In the cave, the quartz-rich bedrock sparkled in the lamplight, and the water trickling through the fissures in the rock still seemed to Detlef like miniwaterfalls, just like little unexplored alternate universes. The geologists on the project were busy collecting samples while the engineering personnel were measuring, calculating and extrapolating the data from the cave-in. A space half as tall as a grown man was strewn with muck, cables, twisted steel bars, tools and scattered pieces of machinery. Detlef rubbed the abrasive rock, more solid than steel, his heart pounding. The site had been cleared, exposing the end of the TBM. The mammoth machine, so uncannily familiar, was as helpless as a weird insect caught in congealed sap. A strange sentiment welled up inside him, a sense of failure mixed with melancholy. Quite unprofessionally, he even wondered whether he was damaging something, or about to disturb something.
But this feeling was fleeting. Detlef was a technical person, and the training he had received was not to feel moral doubt or indulge his imagination, but to assess the current situation and recommend the most advantageous and quickest possible resolution. He scrutinized the damage to the TBM while communicating through an interpreter with the engineering personnel on the surface and his comrades in the tunnel. They were discussing viable salvages.