by Wu Ming-Yi
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.
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.
“Get ready for a view of the sea.”
22. A Rainstorm’s Coming
Atile’i drank from the cup Alice offered him and said, “This water tastes of scorched earth.”
Alice could not understand what he was saying, but assuming he was asking the name of the beverage, she said, “It’s called coffee. This is salama coffee, Hafay’s signature blend. I learned how to make it from her.”
Communication proceeded slowly. They had to go back to square one to relearn how to refer to everything. There were new things, and new names for old things. It was difficult for both Alice and Atile’i. But Alice realized that there can gradually be dialogue, even between languages that are quite far apart. Sometimes one doesn’t have to use language as it’s commonly defined. For instance, Atile’i would use his speaking flute to help him express himself or his emotions when Alice didn’t understand what he meant. Atile’i would play the flute with feeling and Alice would understand immediately. One time Atile’i was describing the beauty of his lover Rasula, “so beautiful that she can soothe anyone’s salikaba,” but Alice could not figure out what he meant until he played a short melody on the flute, utterly absorbed. “So beautiful that she can soothe anyone’s soul, right? Salikaba means soul, doesn’t it?” As if that was just what Atile’i, playing on the speaking flute, had said.
Ten days earlier, Alice would have doubted the reliability of flutesong translation, but now she would say, “I can understand almost everything Atile’i’s trying to say with the speaking flute.” It was like an interlanguage between them, helping familiarize them with basic words, like “sali
kaba” and “soul,” and rules of usage. It was like some little elf that would fly over and whisper what Atile’i wanted to say in her ear.
Atile’i treasured his speaking flute because it was a gift from Rasula. The kiki’a wine she’d made was gone, but he hadn’t lost the speaking flute, because he’d used a fine rope to hang it around his neck. The flute was wooden and about ten centimeters long. It was played horizontally like a transverse flute, except that the finger holes were in two parallel rows. The body of the instrument was so small that Atile’i could almost play it without his hands, by holding it in his mouth.
Maybe because Alice had a gift for languages, she could understand at least thirty, maybe forty, percent of what Atile’i was saying. Of course, “speaking” was still difficult, for the two languages were totally different phonetically. Alice slowly went from using her own language exclusively to being able to mix in some Wayo Wayoan words, which Atile’i found reassuring. It wasn’t like he needed to be reassured about Alice. He knew from the beginning that this woman meant him no harm. This was just the consolation of language. After all, he had once thought he might die here, in a world full of bizarre and unfamiliar things, without ever hearing another person speak his native tongue again. Being able to hear someone speak broken Wayo Wayoan now made him very happy.
Sometimes it was hard to tell from his expression alone whether or not Atile’i was listening or understanding. He often looked off into the distance muttering something to himself. Later she understood that the mantra he kept repeating meant, “The fish will always come.”
The fish will always come, as will the rain. The average rainfall seemed to be increasing, and it was falling more and more violently with each passing year. Alice was especially inclined to think of Toto on rainy days or when she saw a faraway look in Atile’i’s eyes. Atile’i appeared to be five or six years older than Toto, because he said he had lived through a hundred and eighty moons before going to sea. Though it was hard to know how long he had spent at sea, there was still something childish in the expressions that he wore on his weathered dark-brown face.
