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San Felipe do Caiapo was a collection of shacks, some wood, some adobe-and-thatch, dispersed around a rutted open space that did service as central square, market, sports ground and local park. There was an inn, a mud walled church, a swaying bridge over the river, and a garage - an open shed flanked by a single rusty gasoline pump which was surrounded by an assortment of decrepit vehicles. Without exception, these were of pre-war vintage and looked as though they had just man aged to struggle as far as San Felipe when they were new, and had never been able to raise the necessary horsepower to leave again.
Most of the population were seated outside the front doors of their houses, leaning against the walls to get the maximum amount of shade from the projecting eaves, but there were several groups of men along a boardwalk linking the building on one side of the square rather in the manner of a Hollywood western.
Illya bumped the Volkswagen across the plaza, scattering chickens, dogs and mules, and edged the car cautiously over the bridge. There was only a trickle of water in the pebbly river bed below.
Beyond the town, the road twisted through a belt of forest, breasted a rise, and dropped down to the river again, where it joined a wider, paved highway running almost due north and south. Kuryakin took the northerly direction and beaded for Getuliana. Presently the valley widened, the hills at each side became lower, and the river looped away in a series of ox-bows across an alluvial plain.
In a few miles, he caught sight of the new city. Or, rather, the place where the new city was destined to be.
The road clung to higher ground at the side of the wide valley, and the excavations - a couple of miles away in the middle of the plain - were spread out before him like a map. Hundreds of acres had been cleared, bulldozed into squares and rectangles and crescents, segmented by radial boulevards converging on a central space, laterally divided by wide avenues. But apart from the temporary huts erected by contractors, there wasn't a building in sight. A cloud of dust above the yellowish earth marked the place where a single bulldozer was working near a pair of cranes in one corner of the vast site. But the only other activity Illya could see was a mile away to the north, where the antlike movements of a fleet of trucks and several dozen men centered on a pair of heavy transport aircraft drawn up at one end of a wide landing strip.
Soon the distant puttering of the bulldozer was submerged in a heavier, deeper rumble. For a moment, he sought the source of the noise. Then his eye caught a moving dust cloud to his right. A column of trucks was winding its way along a route leading from the site to the road be was on. In a few minutes, the convoy roared past, heading for San Felipe and the damn. All the trucks were covered - and each one seemed to have a man in some sort of uniform beside the driver.
It was unbearably hot parked in the sunlight at the edge of the road. Making up his mind suddenly, Kuryakin swung over the VW's wheel and set off the way he had come, following the convoy back towards the dam.
Three or four miles after the junction with the road to San Felipe village, the valley narrowed and the sides became steep and rocky. Soon he was driving along a serpentine defile above whose thickly wooded lower slopes great cliffs reared skywards.
Abruptly the gorge divided: the river in its stony bed burrowed beneath the road and was seen to be emerging from the canyon on the right, while the tributary valley on the left was marked only by a dried-up watercourse showing not even a trickle of moisture. The road forked too, though in a contrary sense - for while the highway to the south twisted away towards the pass at the head of the minor valley, the road following the main gorge was blocked a hundred yards further on by wire mesh gate on steel frames. And the smooth blacktop which had distinguished the highway ever since Getuliana swerved aside from the main road and continued beyond the gates to where, a half mile away, the great bulk of the dam itself was visible around a bend in the valley. Beyond a cracked and peeling sign pointing to AGUACALINDA - SANTA MARIA DA CONCEICAO - GOIÁS the trunk road relapsed at once into an unsurfaced dirt-track alternating chassis-breaking potholes with extrusions of naked bed rock. Clearly the pavement had been laid only to assist the contractors in moving materials from landing strip to dam, and the hell with local communications.
Illya had no means of knowing how wide the reservoir might be in the drowned valley behind the barrage, but the actual dam was one of the highest he had ever seen. From the curved lip spanning the gorge high up against the blue wedge of sky, the great curtain of concrete plunged downwards in three stages like a frozen wave. At each level, multiple arches housing the sluices linked blockhouses from which the giant-bore pipes dropped to the hydroelectric generating station below. And around the power station an ancillary web of transformer housings, masts, insulators and pylons had been neatly spun. Towering between the age-old rock faces of that desolate valley, the dam was a testament to the ingenuity of man, a beautiful piece of engineering.
The agent drove slowly up to the wire gates blocking the road to the power station. On either side as far as he could see, ten-foot wire fencing behind a deep ditch guarded the boundaries of the property. A man came out of a small concrete building just inside the gates. He was dressed in the same khaki and black uniform worn by the guards Illya had seen in the convoy. And he was carrying a machine pistol.
"What do you want?" he called over the top of the gates. His voice was not friendly.
"This is the San Felipe dam, isn't it?" Illya called, putting his head out of the car window. "The Moraes-Wassermann project?"
The guard continued staring at him, saying nothing.
"I am a construction engineer… in Brazil on a short visit to survey progress in hydroelectric works, bridging, and so on. They tell me the barrage here, is particularly interesting and I wondered -"
"This is private property," the man said. "On your way.
"Most dams are on private property, but that does not mean that a courteously worded request -"
"I said beat it," the guard snapped, his sullen face scowling. "We don't like snoopers around here. Like I said, it's private, see. Now get out."
"But how can I get to see the artificial lake…"
"You can't. You can either go back to San Felipe or go on to Aguacalinda or Goiás - if you like driving over bare rock. And you won't see the lake from either road, because it's not overlooked by any goddamn road. It's too high up and the rocks are too steep around it… There's a third choice: you stay here one minute more, I'll call out the site police and have you towed off our property. And they're not gentle."
"Well, really… I'm not on your property anyway. I'm outside the gates."
"You're on private property the moment you leave that fork. Now are you getting the hell out of here, Or…"
Hoping that he had displayed the correct amount of outraged resentment to pass for a visitor consumed merely with idle curiosity, Illya turned the Volkswagen and drove on towards Aguacalinda. Although the surface was very bad, the road appeared - judging from the multiplicity of tire marks in the dust - to carry fairly heavy traffic.