Just then, from deep in the mountain, there was a huge noise, a noise Detlef had never heard before in his entire life. It could only be described as a voice in a dream.
All the personnel fell silent, and there was nothing but the sound of running water. Everyone appeared confused, out of breath. It might have been anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute when the lights went out. “Power’s out again!” Detlef heard Jung-hsiang Li shout something, as if to tell everyone to keep it down. The workers were evidently well-trained, as nobody fled in panic and everyone quieted down. The men in the tunnel had everything under control except their panting, which made them sound like countless furtive beasts lying in ambush in the darkness. It was a darkness nobody had ever experienced before, an absolute darkness. Then, from the heart of the mountain, they heard the same sound for the second time, as if some enormous entity had stamped its right foot and now its left, with a third stomp following close behind. It sounded like someone was walking step by step toward the cave. No, maybe he was walking away.
“Zou!” Walk! No, run! Detlef understood at least this one Mandarin word, and he along with all the other personnel started fleeing toward the cave entrance the second Jung-hsiang Li gave the order to evacuate. They made it there safe, but were scared out of their wits. Some leaned against the wall; others knelt on the ground. There hadn’t really been another cave-in, but that didn’t make any difference to any of them, because there had been such a strange, oppressive air, such a distinctly hostile atmosphere in the cave just now. Everyone had felt it.
Detlef knew from the accident report that the blackout lasted for less than a minute before the backup power came on. But everyone who’d been in the tunnel that day felt that more than ten minutes was more like it. Was the discrepancy just psychological, subjective? Detlef kept wondering as he remembered the incident. Jung-hsiang Li said that because the outage was brief, and since it was an isolated incident, the higher-ups simply censored the record to avoid trouble. Detlef would have done the same had he been the person in charge. But then what exactly was that sound? There was nothing about it in the report, of course, not a word. Detlef asked Li whether the two cave-ins he’d been in had sounded the same.
“Totally different. In a cave-in you hear loose rocks colliding or a fracture in the solid rock. The sound we heard that time … well, you know as well as me. It sounded like a giant footstep.”
A giant footstep. Just what Detlef had been thinking.
Extricating the TBM turned out not to be all that difficult, but soon after there was another serious collapse and the situation became even more complicated. Detlef estimated that fixing the TBM would cost almost the same as buying a new one. He spent a week writing up the report, predicting that the repair would take at least thirty-eight months. After intensive consultations, the infrastructural authority decided to dismantle the TBM and continue along the same section of tunnel with the drill and blast method.
Detlef would never forget. It was at the end of 1997. Hong Kong had just been returned to China, and Christmas was a few days away. It wasn’t raining the day Detlef left the office of the construction authority for his hotel in Taipei, but a clammy, pale-blue fog filled the air. There were huge Christmas trees everywhere. Though there are few Christians in Taiwan, the islanders seemed surprisingly keen on the holiday.
The first time Detlef related his experience to Sara, sitting in a café in Berlin, he asked her, half-seriously: “We both thought it sounded like footsteps, but how could there be such a sound in that tunnel?”
“Who knows?” Sara thought her answer sounded too flippant, and didn’t want to leave it at that. “Well, I’ve been studying the ocean for twenty years, and I’ve discovered that the sea in every different place has its own distinctive sounds. You can hear them if you listen carefully: wind over the water, waves crashing against the rocks, fish jumping and slapping the surface. There are sounds like this in the mountains, I’d bet. There are sounds the ocean makes we still don’t recognize, and the same must be true in the mountains. Let’s say a tree goes extinct. Nobody’s ever going to hear what the wind blowing through its branches sounds like. If you think along those lines, you might say the footstep you heard that day was one of those mountain sounds we don’t know about, at least not yet.”
Detlef knew exactly what she meant, and even felt she’d read his mind. Actually, Detlef’s hearing was abnormally keen, which is why he had gotten interested in tunneling years before. But he still wasn’t prepared to let it go at that. “But don’t you think that’s too anthropomorphic?” he asked.
“Anthropomorphic? Why can’t we be anthropomorphic?” Sara laughed, causing Detlef’s heart to tighten.
“You sound more a poet than a scientist.”
“I am a poet, as well as a scientist,” Sara said. “But I enjoy being a poet more.”
Sara’s ear, like a shy little animal hiding in a thicket, peeked through her fiery hair.
The car was nearing the end of the tunnel. They passed the last mural design and distance marker. With “1 km” to go, there was already light beaming into the tunnel in the distance.
“It’s incredible! To think that we could tunnel through such a mountain,” said Detlef.
“Yeah,” said Jung-hsiang Li. Detlef couldn’t tell whether there was pride in his voice, or some other emotion. “You remember that time I went to pick you up in the car and told you I’d just gotten married? Now my eldest daughter is already married with children.”
“Fifteen years just to dig this one tunnel,” said Detlef. “Seriously, do you think fifteen years was worth it to shave an hour off the trip for all these people all these years?”
“Was it worth it? I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. My job is to dig, not to assess whether it’s worth it or not.”
“But now the heart of the mountain has been hollowed out,” Sara said.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s not important,” said Sara. “I was just thinking that it was such a beautiful mountain and now its heart is hollow.” They were now using ambient lighting in the tunnel. Lighting technology had improved by leaps and bounds the past couple of years, and the retrofit had only been completed the previous year. It now looked like there was a series of skylights on the ceiling of the tunnel spilling natural light down from heaven the whole way. The moment the car left the tunnel, the natural light took over. The weather when they’d entered was fair, so they didn’t expect an overcast sky when they came out the other side.
Then, in an almost imperceptible voice, Jung-hsiang Li said, “To my elder brother it was most definitely not worth it.” Jung-hsiang had mentioned his brother’s passing. What he had not said was that two of his brother’s colleagues were buried during one drill and blast, crushed to death in a shower of rock. Jung-chin had escaped death, but he couldn’t shake depression. They were his friends. From then on he just went through the motions, working like a machine. One day after the road went through, the neighbors discovered he’d committed suicide. He’d hermetically sealed every crack in the room and left the gas on. It was like a cave inside.
“Actually, this is only the second time I’ve been through this tunnel since it opened,” Jung-hsiang Li said, matter-of-factly, looking in the rear-view mirror, as if he had just seen his brother’s face.