from the trunk of a jungle tree-that separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of its extinct crater first, over the remains of its southern rim, and then onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary's cinder cone is just a blemish, like a wart on a nose. The small Yamamoto River runs generally parallel to the Tojo on the other side of the basalt ridge, but descends more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher and higher above that of the Tojo River as both work their way down the mountain. At the site of Lake Yamamoto, it is fifty meters above the Tojo. By drilling the connecting tunnel in a southeasterly direction rather than straight east underneath the ridge, one can bypass a chain of rapids and a waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river's elevation to almost a hundred meters beneath the bottom of the lake.
When The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him by taking him up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to drive down from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed a single-lane road that leads from the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha. 'Fortune has smiled on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer,' Goto Dengo explains. 'With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway-the rise in altitude is gentle enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing in. When we are finished, we will create a low dam near the site that will conceal the most obvious signs of our work. When the river rises to its normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here.'
'It is a good idea,' The General concedes, then mumbles something to his aide about using the same technique at the other sites. The aide nods and
A kilometer into the jungle, the banks rise up into vertical walls of stone that climb higher and higher above the water's level until they actually overhang the river. There is a hollow in the stony channel where the river broadens out; just upstream is the waterfall. At this point the road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets out of the Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General, his aide, and Captain Noda. The river runs over their feet, ankle-deep.
A mouse-hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and an arched ceiling. A six-year-old could stand upright in here, but anyone taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails runs into the opening. 'The main drift,' says Goto Dengo.
'This is it?'
'The opening is small so that we can conceal it later,' Captain Noda explains, cringing, 'but it gets wider inside.'
The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four men squat and duck-walk into the tunnel, pushed by a steady current of air. 'Notice the excellent ventilation,' Captain Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo grins proudly.
Ten meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same vaulted shape, but it's six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced-concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron rails run far away into blackness. A train of three mine cars sits on them-sheet metal boxes filled with shattered basalt. 'We remove waste by hand tramming,' Goto Dengo explains. 'This drift, and the rails, are perfectly level, to keep the cars from running out of control.'
The General grunts. Clearly he has no respect for the intricacies of mine engineering.
'Of course, we will use the same cars to move the, er, material into the vault when it arrives,' Captain Noda says.
'Where did this waste come from?' The General demands. He is pissed off that they are still digging at this late stage.
'From our longest and most difficult tunnel-the inclined shaft to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto,' says Goto Dengo. 'Fortunately, we can continue to extend that shaft even while the material is being loaded into the vault. Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry the material.'
He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. 'As you can see, all of the holes are ready for the demolition charges. Not only will those charges bring down the ceiling, but they will leave the surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult.'
They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. 'We are in the heart of the ridge now,' Goto Dengo says, 'halfway between the two rivers. The surface is a hundred meters straight up.' In front of them, the string of electric lights terminates in blackness. Goto Dengo gropes for a wall switch.
'The vault,' he says, and hits the switch.
The tunnel has abruptly broadened into a flat-bottomed chamber with an arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete massively ribbed every couple of meters. The floor of the vault is perhaps the size of a tennis court. The only opening is a small vertical shaft rising up from the middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain a ladder and a human body.
The General folds his arms and waits while the aide goes around with a tape measure, verifying the dimensions.
'We go up,' says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for The General to bristle, mounts the ladder up into the shaft. It only goes up for a few meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow-gauge railway on the floor. This one's shored up with timbers hewn from the surrounding jungle.
'The haulage level, where we move rock around,' Goto Dengo explains, when they have all convened at the top of the ladder. 'You asked about the waste in those cars. Let me show you how it got there.' He leads the group down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters, past a train of battered cars. 'We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto.'
They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the ceiling. A fat reinforced hose runs up into it, compressed air keening out through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. 'I would not recommend that you look up this shaft, because stray rocks occasionally come down from where we are working,' he warns. 'But if you looked straight up, you would see that, about ten meters above us, this shaft comes up into the floor of a narrow inclined shaft that goes uphill that way-' he motions northwest '-towards the lake, and downhill that way-' He turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.
'Toward the fool's chamber,' The General says, with relish.
'What are you doing with all the waste?' asks The General.
'Spreading some of it down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway that we drove up on. Some of it is stored above to backfill various ventilation shafts. Some is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will explain later.' Goto Dengo leads them back in the direction of the main vault, but they pass by the ladder and turn into another drift, then another. Then the drifts become narrow and cramped again, like the one at the entrance. 'Please forgive me for leading you into what seems like a three-dimensional maze,' Goto Dengo says. 'This part of Golgotha is intentionally confusing. If a thief ever manages to break into the fool's chamber from above, he will expect to find a drift through which the material was loaded into it. We have left one there for him to find-a false drift that seems to lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually, a whole complex of false drifts and shafts that will all be demolished by dynamite when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably be satisfied with what he finds in the fool's chamber.'
He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire of this, but clearly The General is getting a second wind. Captain Noda, taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.
The maze takes some time to negotiate and Goto Dengo, like a prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing patter. 'As I'm sure you understand, shafts and drifts must be engineered to counteract lithostatic forces.'
'What?'
'They must be strong enough to support the rock overhead. Just as a building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof.'
'Of course,' says The General.
'If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a building, then the rock in between
