The Winter Vault (5 page)

The blind man fascinated the stonecutters. The
marmisti
watched his fingers follow the clues in the rock with professional appreciation. They saw that he never faltered, that he moved with intense slowness and precision. If he moved, he was sure. When Jean first saw him in Ramses' lap, she gasped. How still he sat, how sculpted his face; he looked like a living Horus, the god with the head of a bird. One night she saw him, his singlet shining white, and he was singing. The machinery was loud; he could not be heard, his mouth open in silence. But Jean could tell the blind man was singing because he had closed his eyes.

Each river has its own distinct recipe for water, its own chemical intimacies. Silt, animal waste, paint from the hulls of boats, soil carried on skin and clothes and feathers, human spit, human hair … Looking out at the river, which at first had astonished Avery with its smallness – the great Nile seemed to him as slender as a woman's arm, incontestably female – Avery was pained to imagine the force with which it would soon be bound, its submission. Each year, for thousands of years, swollen with the waters from Ethiopia, the Nile offered her intense fertility to the desert. But now this ancient cycle would abruptly end. And end, too, the centuries-old celebrations of that inundation, inseparable from gods and civilization and rebirth, an abundance that gave meaning to the very rotation of the earth.

Instead there would be a massive reservoir reshaping the land – a lake “as large as England” – so large that the estimated rate of evaporation would prove a serious misjudgment. Enough water would disappear into the air to have made fertile for farming more than two million acres. The precious, nutrient-saturated silt that had given the soil of the floodplain such richness would be lost entirely, pinioned, useless behind the dam. Instead, international corporations would introduce chemical fertilizers, and the cost of these fertilizers – lacking all the trace elements of the silt – would soon escalate to billions of dollars every year. Without the sediment from the floods, farmland downriver would soon erode. The rice fields of the northern Delta would be parched by salt water. Throughout the Mediterranean basin, fish populations – dependent on silicates and phosphates from the annual flooding – would decrease, then die out completely. The exploding insect population would result in an exploding scorpion population. The new ecology would attract destructive micro-organisms that would thrive in the new moist environment, and introduce new pests – the cotton-leaf worm and the great moth and the cornstalk-borer – that would devastate the very crops the dam was meant to make possible. Insects would spread infectious – and excruciating – diseases in plague proportions, such as bilharzia, an illness caused by a parasite laying its eggs in almost any organ of the human body – including liver, lungs, and brain.

The silt, like the river water, also had its own unique intimacies, a chemical wisdom that had been refining itself for millennia. To Jean, the Nile silt was like flesh, it held not only a history but a heredity. Like a species, it would never again be known on this earth.

At the new site of the temple, without the ecology of the original shore, there would also be consequences – a kind of revenge. The desert and the river had always safeguarded the temples, but now their divine protection would come to an end. At the new height, there would be severe erosion by sandstorms, and lawns would have to be planted to replace the sand, the lawns in turn attracting a biblical plague of frogs, which in turn would attract a plague of snakes, which in turn would not attract the tourists …

More than five hundred official guests would attend the inauguration of the re-erected temples. There would be passionate speeches. “No civilized government can fail to give first priority to the welfare of its people … The High Dam had to be built, no matter what the effects might be …” “This is not the moment to go back over the actions and reactions to which the International Campaign has given rise …”

Simulation is the perfect disguise. The replica, which is meant to commemorate, achieves the opposite effect: it allows the original to be forgotten. Out of the crowd, the heckling of a journalist: “It looks exactly the same! What have you boys done with the forty million bucks?”

No word would be uttered of the Nubians who had been forced to leave their ancient homes and their river, nor of the twenty-seven towns and villages that had vanished under the new lake: Abri, Kosh Dakki, Ukma, Semna, Saras Shoboka, Gemaii, Wadi Halfa, Ashkeit, Dabarosa, Qatta, Kalobsha, Dabud, Faras …

… Farran's Point, thought Avery, Aultsville, Maple Grove, Dickinson's Landing, half of Morrisburg, Wales, Milles Roches, Moulinette, Woodlands, Sheek Island …

At the edge of the St. Lawrence River, near Aultsville, Canada, Avery awaited the arrival of the Bucyrus Erie 45 – The Gentleman – an immense dragline that had been floated to the future site of the St. Lawrence dam from a Kentucky coal mine. All around him was a display that would satisfy even the most ardent machine-worshipper: nine dredges, eighty-five scrapers, one hundred and forty shovels and draglines, fifteen hundred tractors and trucks.

This was the moment his father had loved best, surveying the gathering of the mechanical infantry; making ready not to capture the hill but to eliminate it, or manufacture it, as circumstances demanded. William Escher knew this was not a simple battle of brute force between technology and nature but a test of will, two intelligences pitted against each other, requiring both probity and shrewdness.

Avery contemplated the St. Lawrence clay at his feet. He understood almost instantly that it would harden to rock in winter and in summer grip even the largest wheels immobile. Though it was compliant at the moment, this early afternoon in March 1957, he guessed correctly that the building of the seaway could easily become one of the most treacherous excavations on the continent. Avery had been hired on his own merits and under his father's supervision. But William Escher had died before even the first tree was felled. Since leaving school, Avery had always worked with his father. Now he found himself looking out upon the last moments of a landscape – always their shared ceremony – without his father's hand on his shoulder.

Along these leafy shores of the St. Lawrence, towns and hamlets had sprung up, founded by United Empire Loyalists, settlers made up of former soldiers in the battalion of the “Royal Yorkers.” Then came the German, the Dutch, the Scottish settlers. Then a tourist by the name of Charles Dickens, travelling by steamboat and stagecoach who described the river that “boiled and bubbled” near Dickinson's Landing and the astonishing sight of the log drive. “A most gigantic raft, some thirty or forty wooden houses on it, and at least as many log-masts, so that it looked like a nautical street …”

Before this came the hunters of the sea, the Basque, Breton, and English whalers. And, in 1534, Jacques Cartier, the hunter who captured the biggest prize, an entire continent, by quickly recognizing that, by bark canoe, one could follow the river and pierce the land to its heart.

The great trade barons grumbled, unable to depart their Atlantic ports and conquer the Great Lakes with their large ships, groaning with goods to sell. Two irksome details stood in the way: the second largest falls in the world – Niagara – and the Long Sault Rapids.

The sound of the Long Sault was deafening. It ate words out of the air and anything caught up in its force. For three miles, a heavy mist hung over the river and even those at a distance were soaked with spray. The white water rampaged through a narrow gorge, a gradual thirty-foot descent.

In the mid-1800s, canals were cut to bypass the rapids but were too shallow for the great freighters. It was the way of things; Avery could not name a significant instance where this was not true, that early canals proved to be the first cut of a future dam, no matter how many generations lay between them. Building the seaway, with a dam to span the Canadian and American banks of the river, had been discussed many times, over many decades, until, in 1954, the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was born. Hydro-electricity would be created for both countries; a lake, a hundred miles long, would pool between them.

To achieve these ends, the wild Long Sault would be drained to its riverbed. For a year, while the channels were widened, archaeologists would roam the ships' graveyard where, for centuries, the force of the water had welded cannonballs, masts, and iron plate into the rock of “the cellar” on impact. Nothing short of an explosion would pry them loose.

For some time, Avery sat on the shore of the river, in sight of the heavy machines, and thought about the wildness of that water, the elation of that force. It was familiar to him now, this feeling at the beginning, which he conscientiously registered as containing an element of self-pity; the first signs of a slow, coagulating grief.

In the flooding of the shoreline, Aultsville, Farran's Point, Milles Roches, Maple Grove, Wales, Moulinette, Dickinson's Landing, Santa Cruz, and Woodlands would become “lost.” This was a term for which Avery had once felt contempt but now appreciated, for the sting of its unintentional truth; thousands would become homeless as though through some act of negligence. The former inhabitants would be conglomerated and relocated, distributed between two newly built towns – Town #1 and Town #2, eventually to be named Long Sault and Ingleside. Because the town of Iroquois was to be rebuilt a mile farther from shore and retain its name, officially it was not considered “lost,” though it would lose everything but its name. To be flooded, too, were Croil's, Barnhart, and Sheek islands. Construction would soon begin on the northern edge of the town of Morrisburg to make up for the half of itself that would disappear. The First Nations, descendants of Siberian hunters who'd crossed the land bridge from Asia twenty thousand years before and who'd made these shores their home since the melting of the great glacier, were dispossessed of shore and islands, and heavy metals from the new seaway industries would poison their fish supply and their cattle on Cornwall Island. Spawning grounds would be destroyed. Salmon would struggle upstream, alive with purpose, to find their way blocked by concrete.

The Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario had offered to move houses from the villages to Town #1 or Town #2. These were lifted from their foundations by the gargantuan Hartshorne House Mover. The house mover could lift a one-hundred-and-fifty-tonne building like a piece of cake on its giant steel fork and drop not a crumb. Two men, one standing on the other's shoulders, could fit in the diameter of one tire, and the machine could travel six miles an hour with a full load. The inventor and manufacturer of the Hartshorne House Mover, William J. Hartshorne himself, presided over the seaway operations; Avery had watched while two steel arms embraced the house, a frame was fastened under it and hydraulically lifted. Five hundred and thirty-one homes were being moved this way, two per day.

“Leave your dishes in the cupboard,” boasted Mr. Hartshorne. “Nothing inside will shift an inch!” Even the spoon he had balanced theatrically on the rim of a bowl was still wavering there when they set the first house down and opened the door. The same night, the housewife who owned the spoon in question was so unnerved at being in her own kitchen, many miles away from where she'd eaten her breakfast that very morning, that she dropped and shattered the teapot she'd been so worried about – her mother's Wedgwood, in her family for four generations – as she carried it the short distance from counter to table.

In 1921, the chairman of the hydro-electric commission, Sir Adam Beck, had referred to the future drowning of the villages along the St. Lawrence and the evacuation of their inhabitants as the “sentimental factor.” Now the paper mill had been taken over by the commission for its headquarters, and its regional offices had ensconced themselves in the stocking factory at Morrisburg Not far from where Avery stood, public telescopes would be erected, overlooking the construction site, and bus tours would be organized for the millions of visitors. An historian would be employed to “collect and preserve historical data” from the places to be destroyed. The number of welfare recipients in the counties would increase 100 per cent. Already, Avery knew, there was a rumour one could earn ten dollars an hour moving graves.