Reamde

“Most of this is self-explanatory, if one is willing to put a bit of thought into it,” Jones remarked. “As an example, in this snapshot of Peter donning his snowshoes, there’s a mountain peak in the background, wooded on its lower slopes, but with a barren face—I’m guessing scree beneath the snow. According to the time-stamp, it was taken right around noon—indeed, I can see the remains of your lunch on the seat of the ATV. The shadows should therefore be pointing north. And strangely enough, when we look at the Google satellite image—which was taken during the summer, evidently—we see a peak here, with a scree-covered face turned toward the pin on the map, which is more or less to its south. So it all fits together. Schloss Hundschüttler’s website could hardly be more descriptive; I have already taken the virtual tour of the property and had a virtual pint in the virtual tavern. Virtual pints being the only kind that I, as a devout Muslim, am allowed to have…” Jones had become somewhat rambling, perhaps because Zula was being a little slow to snap out of this combination of cell-induced ennui and the shock of seeing familiar places and faces so displayed. He slid a page across the table at her, then bracketed it between two more. Each contained an image from her phone. “But there are still certain mysteries that require explanation. What the bloody hell is this?” he asked. “I know where it is.” He tapped a location on the map, a few miles south of the Schloss, sprouting a cluster of stickpins. “But what the hell? It’s not mentioned on the Schloss’s site, and even WikiTravel is silent on the matter.”

“It was an abandoned mine.” Zula paused, a little taken aback by the unfamiliar sound of her own voice. Then she corrected herself: “It is an abandoned mine.” She had grown accustomed to thinking of her life and everything she’d ever experienced as dwelling solely in the past.

“What were they mining? Trees?”

She shook her head. “Lead or something; I don’t know.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “What sort of mine requires a million board feet of timber?” For the overwhelming impression given by the photographs was of planks and beams, thousands of them, silver with age, splayed and flattened in some sort of slow-motion disaster that ran all the way down the side of a small mountain. As if the world’s biggest timber flume, a waterfall of rough-sawn planks coursing down the slope, had suddenly been deprived of water and had frozen and shriveled in place.

“Mines are supposed to be below ground, I’d thought,” Jones continued.

“Aren’t you a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines?” Zula asked.

Jones, for once, looked a bit sheepish. “They should probably change the name. It’s not just about that. I only went there to learn how to blow things up. I don’t know squat about mines really.”

“All of this wood was some kind of structure that they built aboveground, obviously. For what purpose I don’t know. But it runs up and down the slope for quite a distance. It’s got to be some kind of mineral separation technique that uses gravity. Maybe they sluiced water down through it, or something. In some places, it’s just these big chutes.” Zula pointed to the wreckage of one such in the background of a photograph of Uncle Richard. Then she shuffled papers around until she found a photo of something that looked like a very old house pushed askew by a shock wave. “Other places you’ll see a platform with a shack, or even something the size of this, built on it. But they are mostly just flattened, as you can see.”

“Well, whatever this thing is, it’s eight point four kilometers from the Schloss, and almost exactly the same elevation,” Jones said.

“Because of the railway,” Zula said.

He looked interested. “What railway?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore. But there used to be a narrow-gauge railway that ran from Elphinstone south into this valley. Closest to town was the Schloss, which was the baron’s residence and the headquarters of the whole empire. Farther back up the valley were the mines he made his money from…”

“And this is one of those,” Jones said, flicking his eyes down at the photos they’d been looking at. “But why did you say because of the railway?”

“The elevation,” Zula said. “You noticed that there’s very little difference in altitude. That’s because—”

“Trains aren’t very good at going up and down hills,” Jones completed the sentence for her, nodding.

“Yeah. Neither are bicyclists and cross-country skiers. So—”

“Ah, yes, now I understand. The trail up the valley, so proudly described on the Schloss’s website.”

Zula nodded. “That trail is just the right-of-way of the old narrow-gauge mining railway, paved over.”

“Yes.” Jones considered it for a bit, paying more attention to the convolutions of the terrain shown on the map. “How does one connect with that trail, I wonder?”