JAPAN

Along the Inca Road
By Karin Muller

Nambija. Those who knew the name sucked in their breaths and shook their heads, telling me that it was a desperate place, utterly lawless, beyond the furthest edge of civilization. Reckless souls who went to seek their fortune there were rarely seen again. It lay in the southern Oriente; the steamy, rain-soaked eastern Andes. It was dangerous, filthy, and unforgiving, but it had one redeeming quality – gold. The guidebooks, when they mentioned Nambija at all, warned travelers to stay away.

Gold. The Inca called it the "sweat of the Sun". Only the nobles were allowed to use it. They ate off of it, drank out of it, lined the skulls of their defeated enemies with it. Golden disks adorned their clothes, their palanquins, their palaces and temples. Many of the houses in Cuzco were faced with gold, breathing life into the legend of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. But despite their apparent love of the precious metal, the Inca didn’t worship gold the way the Europeans did. In fact, the metal itself had no particular value until it was crafted into an aesthetically pleasing shape. The Inca Empire had no monetary system. The everyday economy was organized around a more mundane coinage – labor. Sweat was sellable. Gold belonged to the Gods.

Little did they know that the precious yellow metal would one day cause their empire to come crashing down.

ARRIVAL
Nambija clung tenaciously to the hillside, each rickety shack thrusting away from the mountain on spindly legs. We found ourselves climbing endless steps, past gamblers tossing down their cards beside huge wads of worthless bills. Dim cafés were wrapped in the stench of boiling pig fat and the bloodied clientele of whiskey shops lay propped up on stools against the moldy walls. I asked for a hostel. The card game paused just long enough for someone to point a chin uphill. Two white faces provoked surprisingly little interest. Or perhaps Nambija just played its cards close to its chest.

The "hotel" – an arrow pointing at an open space occupied by a single, soiled outhouse -- was closed, but across the street a café owner offered us a miner’s room upstairs. It was barely the size of a walk-in closet, with a narrow wooden bench that served as a bed and a pair of broken leather dancing shoes high up on a dusty shelf. The bathroom, I was told, was in the non-hotel across the street. Showers? Well, we could use the hose out in the cement courtyard when no one was looking.

I waited until long after normal people are safely tucked between their sheets and crept back outside. Further down the mountain I could see puddled light where people labored, filling the machines, sifting through the ore, always moving to that relentless, pounding beat. Nambija clearly never went to sleep. Cautiously I began to strip. A young miner appeared out of nowhere, sucked a mouthful of water from the hose, and began brushing his teeth with the frayed end of a stick. A half-naked white woman in the middle of his courtyard seemed about as likely as my finding a gremlin reading the morning paper on my front lawn. He nodded a brief greeting, rinsed out his mouth, and went back to bed.

This was going to be an interesting place.

THE MINE
The cement steps were Nambija’s central artery, the only solid structure on the slippery mountainside. The houses clung to it for balance. The entire town looked precarious, like a layered house of cards.
We crested the final step, waded through a field of garbage, and stood face to face with a black hole that disappeared into the mountainside. Muddy men in rubber boots scurried in and out like a stream of ants, some slumped under the weight of ore and others taking a last few breaths of air before plunging back inside.

The passage was only wide enough for one. Fully loaded kargadors had right of way. When we heard them coming we scurried to the nearest alcove to let them pass, muscles straining, eyes fixed on the next bend and the fantasy of daylight. The journey down was only half an hour -- according to my watch -- but the absolute blackness smothered time and the minutes struggled by like insects caught in sticky sap.

Just when it seemed that all of life swam in the small pool of my headlight the narrow tunnel opened out and we found ourselves at the edge of an immense cave the size of a cathedral. I doused my light. Blackness settled on me like a coat of tar. All around a hundred stars glowed dimly, each a single candle by which a miner worked his claim. For the first time I realized that the heavy thumping of machinery was gone – we were too deep in the bowels of the earth to hear it. In its place there was the tack-tack of countless hammers hitting stone. It was an eerie, upside-down hell, the winking stars below and only suffocating rock above.

One miner lay sleeping on a tattered mat across the entrance to an alcove. He woke up as the unexpected light from John’s camera cut across his face. Rather than throw rocks at us, as I would have done had I been torn from sleep by that blinding glare, he sat up and asked us if there was anything he could help us with. Nambija was not living up to its bleak reputation.

He was, he said, sleeping there to protect his claim. He pointed at a piece of wall that looked just like any other. He shared a twenty-four-hour shift with his partner, and came out only to eat and wash and haul his ore down to the machines.

"Do you think you’ll strike it rich one day?" I asked.

He shrugged. "We’re all here looking for a better life." But there was always that chance that the next hammer strike would reveal a vein of solid gold. Everyone, it seemed, had heard of someone who had gone from rags to riches in a single day. No one knew exactly who, but the possibility was there. His body leaned forward, re-energized by the thought.

He must be a newcomer. I wondered how long his naïve enthusiasm would survive this living hell.

"I came here eight years ago," he said. Eight years. Twelve sacks a day. 423 steps. Sleeping in a stifling hole and seeing sunlight through eyes slitted against the unaccustomed glare. And yet he spoke as though tomorrow might well be the day when he stubbed his toe on that precious nugget of gold.

"And if you do?"

"I’d leave here," he said without hesitation. He’d take his wife and three children – children who had been born amidst the sludge and refuse, who knew no other home than the rickety huts of Nambija – and build a proper house far away. As he spoke I saw the dream emerge as bright and dependable as the rising sun.

The journey to the surface was interminable – at every turn I expected to see a distant light that never came. When we at last emerged I had to cover my eyes against the glare. I looked at my watch.

Three hours.
Eight years.
Unimaginable.

DAILY LIFE
And yet life went on. The women scrubbed their laundry on the courtyard’s cement floor. You could buy everything from batteries to light bulbs in the shops that lined the stairs. Children grew up playing among the ancient hulks of discarded machinery. Deep inside the bowels of the earth young couples courted and babies were eventually born. As I left the courtyard I caught a whiff of something utterly incongruous amidst the odors of pig manure and burning trash -- the scent of fresh-baked bread. It drew me like a half-starved dog.

The café owner laughed at my hungry, hopeful face and waved me onto a stool. "Ten more minutes", she said, looking over her shoulder at a blackened stove. I sat. A drunk staggered over and jiggled his half-empty bottle. She shooed him away like a pesky fly. He turned to me, doffed his hat and offered me a drink. Then he wobbled off and threw up on one of his compatriots who lay senseless in a pool of drying blood.

She introduced herself as Maria-Celeste, a name that seemed too feminine for her work-chapped hands. She had nine children and had built her tiny store with discarded plywood boards after her husband left her for another woman. Her eldest boys were in boarding school in Zamora, the nearest town of consequence. The middle girls studied here – one was writing in a scrappy notebook amidst the sleeping drunks – and the youngest she kept with her at the store. She made ends meet by selling bowls of puddled pig stew and mopping up the blood and urine of her more inebriated clientele. She stood straight and proud, one hand on the shoulder of a three-year-old girl who leaned against her thigh. Yes, she knew where her husband lived and no, she didn’t want him back.

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