number of massive, dark rocks that have tumbled from the top of the mountain—rocks so macabre and ugly, so loaded with menace, they look like the bodies of the infirm, the deformed and the mad subjected to unimaginable tortures, screaming in pain, struggling, squirming and finally petrifying in the tormented shape of their final punishment, of death by fire or iron. In geographical terms, choosing this place to set up a prison camp on the side of a mountain is a stroke of genius because the Pass of the Immortal Steering Wheel need only be closed for it to be cut off from the world, and any attempt at escape would be bound to fail.
The substantial river becomes narrower and narrower until it is little more than a stream, running dry most of the time, as it crosses a tiny plain one kilometre long by two wide, thrown up in the heart of the mountains, surrounded by cliffs and painstakingly sealed off with high walls of barbed wire. At fifty-metre intervals along the fence there are watchtowers guarded by armed soldiers and equipped with searchlights, which sweep their powerful beams over every corner and recess of the grounds.
The camp is divided into two areas: on the right bank of the River Lu are the administrative buildings, residences for prison staff, an infirmary, a shop, the warders’ canteen and a strange concrete edifice built in the 1960s to house the directing staff of the provincial police force, should there be an American invasion, a sort of shapeless lump partly buried underground with a vast dome camouflaged under artificial trees standing on a three-storey quadrilateral with walls also smothered in ivy and climbing plants, which are stirred by the slightest wind, the slightest breath of breeze, turning the building into a monster, a peculiar species of hedgehog.
As the American invasion never came, by the early 1970s the edifice was lived in by the families of the head warders who, even on their days off, keep a watchful eye over the other part of the camp on the more steeply sloping left bank of the River Lu, the part reserved exclusively for prisoners: first, the work camp proper, a mine exploited using medieval techniques where each gem shaft is indicated by a heap of earth around an opening a couple of metres in diameter, gaping holes dug at random into the bank or beside the river bed. At first light an army of ghosts—how many of them? a thousand? two thousand?—winds its way down to the river bank in single file in detachments of twenty or so individuals, each stumbling and swaying to a separate shaft. Fifty light bulbs come on one by one along the river, each lighting its own shaft, where a warder does a roll call of his uniformed, shaven-headed prisoners (only cooks, pig-keepers and barbers are allowed to keep their hair), who line up like soldiers while he bellows out their numbers, which echo around the mountain. The warder then repeats, as he does every morning, the punishment each of them exposes himself to for the least breach of discipline, before the prisoners—one by one, each laden with heavy tools, packs of explosives and bamboo baskets—silently climb down an infinitely long bamboo ladder to reach the bottom of the shaft, a dozen or so metres below ground. One of them, often the most experienced, lights three candles in a basket, lowers it gently to the bottom and sets it at the mouth of the gallery they have to dig. This is the only security measure available to them in that, if oxygen runs low, the three candles will go out.
Just one prisoner stays on the surface (he might once have been an engineer or a great opera singer, who knows?) and he takes a mouthful of fuel and spits a thin stream of it onto the carburettor while pulling the cord, and the motor shudders with heavy spasms, which make the ground shake as it comes to life. A pump spews out black water drawn from the bottom of the shaft as the sound of other motors carries from shafts further away. The racket from these thrumming witches’ cauldrons heralds the beginning of a long day of forced labour in the shadows, with the members of each team staying underground for six hours, barefoot in mud and water, standing and digging or kneeling and digging into the clay that falls away in blocks, fingering and prodding the walls in