Now he wept when he passed the waste pile, when he was drawn at night to stand before it with a lamp or summoned to salvage one lonely stone for his pocket or his table. Sometimes it seemed that the pile was an open wound or an abattoir of stones. But the longer he stood the more it seemed that a piece of the world had been misplaced and abandoned at his cabin side.
Then he took a spade and dug a pit behind the waste pile. First he gathered the chipped yellow stones which lay on the surface and placed them together in a bucket. And then he removed the thin soil crust and piled it neatly onto a tarpaulin. Each individual layer was dug out and piled separately, until the pit was shoulder deep. The continents and planets, the landscapes and coastlines of the waste dump were shovelled into the pit and one by one, in order, the layers of Ibela-hoy were put back in place. Then he scattered the chipped yellow stones on to the bulging ground.
When the gangs delivered drill cores they noticed that the waste had gone. I buried it, he said. I put it back. He showed them where the swollen ground was settling. Well, they said, that’s very neat and tidy. Or, Is that what you’re paid to do, fool about with spades? His replies made no sense to them. They continued to talk with him roughly or to humour him with banter. What should we do for him, they asked amongst themselves, to bring him back to earth? Should we write, they wondered, to his wife and children or to the boss? Should we let him be and let the illness pass? Some of the kinder, older men went to talk with him, to offer help, to exchange a word or two about the samples on his bench. Yet he seemed indifferent to them and those funnels of earth and stone which could earn them all a fortune. Was that the yellow of bauxite or the rose of cinnabar or the fire-blue of opal? The company agent did not seem to share their excitement or their interest. But when at last they left him in peace he turned to the samples on his bench and sorted through them with unbroken attention. A stone of apple-green he removed and walked with it into the valley where in a cave there were lichens of the same colour. A fistful of grit he scattered in the grass so that it fell amongst the leaf joints like sleet. A round stone he placed on the river bed with other round stones. A grey landscape in an inch of granite he stood in the shadow of the greyest rock. A chip of pitchblende was reunited with black soil.
Once a month, when his provisions were delivered together with letters from home, the company agent presented his report and sent back to the city any minerals or gemstones which were worthy of note. Once he had found a fragment of platinum in a sample from the plateau beyond the hill. He and the gang waited a month for the company’s response. Low-quality platinum, they said. No use to us. And once he had identified graphite amongst the native carbons. But, again, the company was unimpressed. Now he wrapped a piece of damp clay and placed it in a sample bag. Its colours were the colours of pomegranate skins. Its odour was potatoes. He sealed the bag and sent it to the company. Urgent, he wrote on the label. Smell this! And, in the second month, he sent them a cube of sandstone and wrote: See the landscape, the beach, the pathway through the rocks. And later they received the palmful of pebbles that they had requested in his dream.
Alarms rang. Secretaries delivered the agent’s file to the company bosses. They searched the certificates and testimonials for any criminal past. Was he a radical? Had he been ill? What should they make of clay, sandstone, pebbles? They called his mother to the offices and questioned her. She showed them her son’s monthly letters and pointed to those parts where he spoke of insomnia, an abattoir of stones and a family that never was. He misses home, she said. Why would he send worthless soil and cryptic notes in sample bags? She could not say, except that he had always been a good man, quick to tears. If he had only married, found a girl to love, had children perhaps … then who can guess what might have been? But worthless soil? Still she could not say.
The bosses sent their man to Ibela-hoy in their air-conditioned jeep to bring the agent home and to discover what went on. The brick and tarmac of the town and villages lasted for a day. The bosses’ man passed the night at the Rest House where the valley greens rose to the implacable evening monochromes of the hills. In the morning, early, he drove on to the bouldered track along the valley side. The Hill Without a Hat swung across his windscreen in the distance. On the summit of the ridge the track widened and cairns marked the route down into the valley of Lekadeeb and then up again towards Ibela-hoy. He stood with his binoculars and sought out the company agent’s cabin in the hollow of the hill. He saw the company mobile parked at the door and the antics of men who seemed intoxicated with drink or horseplay. A survey team had returned from the far valley bluffs some days ahead of schedule and hurried to the agent’s cabin. The men were wild. They had found silver. They had recognized small fragments in their drill cores and had excavated in the area for larger quantities. They placed a half-dozen jagged specimens on the company agent’s bench. Tell us it isn’t silver, they challenged him. He looked at one piece of silver shaped like a stem of ginger but metallic grey in colour with puddles of milky-white quartz. What he saw was a bare summit of rock in sunshine. But snow in its crevices was too cold to melt. I’ll do some tests, he said.
The men sat outside in their drilling mobile and waited for his confirmation that at last their work had produced minerals of great value. There were bonuses to be claimed, fortunes to be made, celebrations, hugging, turbulent reunions with wives and children to anticipate. The company agent turned the snowy summit in his hand and divined its future. And its past. Once the word Silver was spoken in the company offices, Ibela-hoy could count on chaos; there would be mining engineers, labour camps, a village, roads, bars, drink, soldiers. Bulldozers would push back the soil and roots of silver would be grubbed like truffles from the earth. Dynamite, spoil heaps, scars. And he, the company agent, the man who spilled the beans, would have no time to reconcile the stones, the dreams, the family, the fatigue, the sleeplessness which now had reached its final stage. The turmoil had begun already. He heard the smooth engine of the company jeep as it laboured over the final rise before the cabin. He saw the bosses’ man climb out with his folder and his suit and pause to talk with the men who waited inside the mobile’s cab. Arms were waved and fingers pointed towards the bluffs where silver lay in wait.
I’ll put it back, he said.
By the time the bosses’ man had walked into the cabin with a string of false and reassuring greetings on his lips, the company agent had pocketed the half-dozen pieces of silver and had slipped away into the rocks behind the cabin. He climbed as high as was possible without breaking cover and crouched in a gulley. He toyed with the stones on the ground, turning them in his palms, and waited for night. He watched as the bosses’ man ran from the cabin and the survey gang jumped from their mobile and searched the landscape for the agent. He watched as they showed the bosses’ man where he had buried the waste heap, the world misplaced. He watched as the gang brought picks and shovels, and (insensitive to topsoils and chipped yellow stones) dug into the abattoir. He watched the bosses’ man crouch and shake his head as he sorted through the debris for the gold, the agate, the topaz which the men promised had been buried, hidden, there. It was, they said, a matter for the madhouse or the militia. They’d watched the agent for a month or two. He had hugged boulders. He had hidden gemstones, their gemstones, company gemstones, throughout the valley. They’d seen him walking, crouching, placing gemstones in the shade of rocks, in the mouth of caves, under leaves.