Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar

Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar

Author:Héctor Tobar [Tobar, Héctor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Disaster, History, Latin America, Nonfiction, Retail, South America
ISBN: 9780374709204
Google: LXtzAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00J6TV17C
Barnesnoble: B00J6TV17C
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2014-10-07T04:00:00+00:00


PART II

SEEING THE DEVIL

10

THE SPEED OF SOUND

For the first few minutes after the breakthrough of drill 10B, the men keep pounding at its shaft. They take turns, hitting it not just with Richard Villarroel’s chrome wrench, but also with loose stones and a hammer, not paying much heed to those warning that the rock loosened by the drill could fall on their heads. “We were like little kids hitting a piñata,” Omar Reygadas remembers. Como cabros chicos pegándole a una piñata. The shirtless boys in the yellow, blue, and red helmets keep hitting, until one of the miners drives up with a forklift, which lifts up Yonni Barrios and Carlos Barrios in a basket to perform the critical task of reinforcing the spot with steel bars. They’re frantic, yelling instructions back and forth: Above all, they have to erase any doubt the people on the surface might have about men being alive down here. Make a sound, leave a mark, attach a note. Someone says to stop hitting the bar, to see if the people who are at the top are answering, and Yonni puts his ear to the bar and says, yes, he hears them tapping back. A miner tosses Yonni a can of red spray paint, and he tries to leave a mark on the shaft, but the steel is covered in a stream of muddy water flowing from up above that erases the paint again and again. “We needed to dry the bar, but we didn’t have anything dry to clean it with.” Eventually some of the paint seems to stick. The men tie the notes and letters they’ve prepared, more than a dozen in all, wrapping them in pieces of plastic and strips of electrical tape and rubber tubing against the moisture that’s pouring down through that hole, worrying that a piece of paper might not survive the long journey back up through the slosh. They keep pounding on the bar.

* * *

Nelson Flores, the drill operator, feels the pulse in the steel from down below before he hears it. At first he wonders if it’s just the weight of the 115 steel bars, 22 tons’ worth, striking and settling against one another in the shaft. Putting his ear to the uppermost bar in the shaft, he hears a tapping that’s fast and frantic, but which then slows, “as if the viejos down there were getting tired.” As word goes out for all the other drills on the mountain to stop, several other men listen to the sounds coming from the steel tube. “It’s them!” The drill team moves quickly and carefully to add one more steel bar to the shaft, so they can measure how deep the cavity is by lowering the bit until it strikes something and stops. When they’re done, Flores watches as the shaft moves four meters before it stops, which is exactly the height of the passageway they were aiming for. Listening to the shaft again, they hear that the sound



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