smaller ones endure. This puts Goto Dengo in the mind of writing a poem in which the small, tenacious Nipponese prevail over the big, lumbering Americans, but it has been a long time since he wrote a poem and he can't make the words go together.
Someday the plants will turn this cone of scoria and rubble into soil, but not yet. Now that Goto Dengo can finally see for more than a few yards he is beginning to understand the lay of the land. The numerical data that he and Ninomiya have compiled over the last week is being synthesized, within his mind, into a solid understanding of how this place works.
Calvary is an old cinder cone. It started as a fissure from which ash and scoria were ejected, one fragment at a time, for thousands of years, tumbling up and outwards in a family of mortar-shell-like parabolic curves, varying in height and distance depending on the size of each fragment and the direction of the wind. They landed in a wide ring centered on the fissure. As the ring grew in height it naturally spread out into a broad, truncated cone with a central pit gouged out of its top, with the spitting fissure in the bottom of that pit.
The winds here tend to come from a little bit east of due south, and so the ash tended to be pushed towards the north-by-northwest edge of the cone's rim. That is still the highest point of the cinder cone. But the fissure died out eons ago, or perhaps was plugged by its own emissions, and the whole structure has been much eroded since then. The southern rim of the cone is just a barrier of low hills perforated by the courses of the Yamamoto River and the two tributaries that come together to form the Tojo River. The central pit is a bowl of loathsome jungle, so saturated with chlorophyll that it looks black from above. Birds cruise above the canopy, looking like colored stars from up here.
The northern rim still rises a good five hundred meters above the bowl of jungle, but its formerly smooth arc has been dissected by erosion to form three distinct summits, each one a pile of red scoria half-concealed by a stubble of green vegetation. Without discussion, Ninomiya and Goto Dengo head for the one in the middle, which is the highest. They reach it at about two-thirty in the afternoon, and immediately wish they hadn't because the sun is beating almost straight down on top of them. But there is a cool breeze up here, and once they have protected their heads with makeshift burnooses, it's not so bad. Goto Dengo sets up the tripod and the transit while Ninomiya uses his sextant to shoot the sun. He has a pretty good German watch which he zeroed against the radio transmission from Manila this morning, and this enables him to reckon the longitude. He works the calculation out on a scrap of paper on his lap, then goes back and does it again to double-check the numbers, speaking them out loud. Goto Dengo copies them down in his notebook, just in case Ninomiya's notes get lost.
At three o'clock sharp, the enlisted man down in the tree begins to flash his mirror at them: a brilliant spark from a dark rug of jungle that is otherwise featureless. Ninomiya centers his transit on this signal and takes down more figures. In combination with various other data from maps, aerial photos and the like, this should enable him to make an estimate of the main shaft's latitude and longitude.
'I don't know how accurate this will be,' he frets, as they trudge down the mountain. 'I have the peak exactly-what did you call it? Cavalry?'
'Close enough.'
'This means soldiers on horseback, correct?'
'Yes.'
'But the site of the shaft I will not have very precisely unless I can use better techniques.'
Goto Dengo considers telling him that this is perfectly all right, that the place was made to be lost and forgotten. But he keeps his mouth shut.
The survey work takes another couple of weeks. They figure out where the shore of Lake Yamamoto will be and calculate its volume. It will be more of a pond than a lake-less than a hundred meters across-but it will be deceptively deep, and it will hold a lot of water. They calculate the angle of the shaft that will connect the bottom of the lake to the main network of tunnels. They figure out where all of the horizontal tunnels will emerge from the walls of the Tojo River's gorge, and stake out the routes of roads and railways that will lead to those openings, so that debris can be removed and precious war material brought in for storage. They double— and triple-check all of it to make sure that no fragment of the works will be visible from the air.
Meanwhile, down below, Lieutenant Mori and a small work detail have planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire-just enough to contain a hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks. When these are put to work, the camp expands very rapidly; the military barracks go up in a few days and the double barbed-wire perimeter is completed. They never seem to lack for supplies here. Dynamite comes in by the truckload, as if it weren't desperately needed in places like Rabaul, and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry it into a special shed that has been constructed for this purpose in the shade of the jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before, and is startled to realize that they are all Chinese. And they are not speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo heard frequently when he was posted in Shanghai. These prisoners are northern Chinese.
It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.
The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion in the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. They are well-armed, and MacArthur has been egging them on. Many thousands of them have been taken prisoner. Within half a day's drive of Bundok there are more than enough Filipino prisoners to fill Lieutenant Mori's camp and accomplish Lieutenant Goto's project. And yet the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.
At times like this he begins to doubt his own sanity. He feels an urge to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend and confidant, has made himself scarce since his work was completed. One day, Goto Dengo goes by Ninomiya's tent and finds it empty. Captain Noda explains that the surveyor was called away suddenly to perform important work elsewhere.
About a month later, when the road-building work in the Special Security Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.
They have uncovered human remains. The jungle has done its work and practically nothing is left but bones, but the smell, and the legions of ants, tell him that the corpse is a fairly recent one. He grabs a shovel from one of the workers and pulls up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the river and the skull is soon revealed: the dome of the head, the eye sockets still not entirely empty, the nasal bone with some fragments of cartilage still attached, and finally the jaws, pocked with old abcesses and missing most of their teeth, except for one gold tooth in the middle. The current turns the skull over slowly, as if Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face in shame, and Goto Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.
He looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on the riverbank, watching him impassively.
'Do not speak of this to any of the other Nipponese,' Goto Dengo says. Their eyes go wide and their lips part in astonishment as they hear him speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.
One of the Chinese workers is nearly bald. He seems to be in his forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell. He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.
'You,' Goto Dengo says, 'pick two other men and follow me. Bring shovels.'
He leads them into the jungle, into a place where he knows there will be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya's new grave. The bald man is a good leader as well as a strong worker and he gets the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains without squeamishness or complaint. If he has been through the China Incident and survived for this long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.
Goto Dengo does his part by distracting Captain Noda for a couple of hours. They go up and tour the dam work on the Yamamoto River. Noda is anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as soon as possible, before MacArthur's air force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.
The site of the lake is a natural rock bowl, covered by jungle, with the Yamamoto River running through the middle of it. Right next to the riverbank, men are already at work with rock drills, placing dynamite charges. 'The inclined shaft will start here,' Goto Dengo tells Captain Noda, 'and runs straight-' turning his back on the river he makes one hand into a blade and thrusts it into the jungle '-straight down to Golgotha.'
'Gargotta?' Captain Noda says.
'It is a Tagalog word,' Goto Dengo says authoritatively. 'It means 'hidden glade.' '
