The Man with the Compound Eyes (26 page)

Except that groundwater inflows might be even scarier than the sandstone. If they penetrated a water-saturated layer during the drilling process, the groundwater would start gushing out, propelling massive amounts of muck at the TBM and causing machinery breakdowns or triggering cave-ins. As a preventative measure, Detlef recommended the addition of a chain-style conveyor as a way of getting the inflows out of the way. After all, any damage to the machine would compromise mechanical smoothness.

The factory team custom-built two 11.74-meter diameter hard-rock double-shielded TBMs. Even assembling such huge machines was an enormous undertaking that took several months all told. During that time, the most interesting time of day for Detlef was checking his e-mail for progress updates.

Not surprisingly, there were setbacks when the machine was put into operation. The rock was so hard that the cutters kept developing abnormal wear and tear, and if they were not replaced immediately the diameter of the borehole would shrink. Like a cat trying desperately to get its head into a hollow, the TBM would keep trying to nibble away at the face of the rock; once the outer shield got wedged in there, the machine could only wait helplessly for the workers to come to the rescue. According to the data Detlef received, during the worst of it the cutters had to be changed every 2.3 meters. Moreover, the inflows were much more serious than anticipated, causing frequent shutdowns even with the conveyor.

When Detlef saw the photographs of the site he had to admit that he had been overly optimistic. Detlef felt a bit depressed, while at the other end of the e-mail Jung-hsiang Li was still bursting with confidence. Engineers like Jung-hsiang Li, and the whole Taiwanese project team in fact, showed an amazing determination to “see the tunnel through.” Detlef fairly admired them for it, but at the same time, inexplicably, it frightened him.

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.