the hopes of finding a trace of gem-stones, but knowing from experience that there is a one-in-ten-thousand chance of success. They fill baskets with clay and indicate when they can be hauled up by blowing a whistle so deadened by the damp that it sounds like a long moan, a lost cry emanating from a dark tomb. The man on the surface pulls the rope, raises the basket, pours the clay into a sieve and, using water from the pump, sorts through it minutely for precious stones.
It is this same dirty muddy water that sprays over the naked prisoners a few hours later at the end of the day. The first man up washes his hair and shoulders while his teammates are still climbing the ladder in a state of near exhaustion. One after another they pause as they reach the surface, as much to take a lungful of dry air as to readjust to the light of day. It is not unusual for one of them to be unable to heave himself out. He then has to be dragged by the arms and pushed from behind before he can collapse by the edge of the shaft, prostrate on the ground, struggling to exhale, more dead than alive.
The gem shafts stay with their slaves once the work is over. On nights when the wind blows and the moon is bathed in a sort of yellow nimbus, the shafts keep their hold on the prisoners’ minds in a different way as they lie on their bunks in vast sealed hangars with corrugated iron roofs: through the tall, high windows they can hear strange noises coming from the shafts, a hundred of them in all, if the camp’s nickname is to be believed, each transformed into an enormous echo chamber, a deep abyss swallowing the mountain wind, which wails and cries: plaintive, tormented cries, shrill, piercing cries hurtling up to the sky and whisked away or metamorphosing into mournful muted exhalations, like a long sigh hovering in the air for a moment before slumping in a corner of the dormitory or dissolving into the darkness above what might have been the bed of a prisoner carried off by dysentery, malaria, jaundice, hunger or exhaustion. Sometimes it sounds like ghost voices whispering for a few seconds, and some think they hear their own names or the names of lost companions.
On terrifying stormy nights, when the wind swoops unbridled through the mountains, these sounds develop into a drum roll as if an army of vengeful spirits were launching an attack on the camp. On quiet nights, so quiet they can hear the corrugated iron cracking as it shrinks in the dropping temperature, having expanded in the heat of the day, a gunshot sometimes shatters the silence, followed by a burst of three further explosions coming from the summary executions site, not far away in the same valley. Always four shots, four related but different sounds, most likely from four rifles to leave no glimmer of hope for the bound and gagged escapee who has just been stopped—yet another one—and now kneels before a hole in the ground into which his body, shot through by four bullets, is to fall.
The camp prisoners are arranged in two distinct categories that never intermix: the common criminals and the “thought criminals.” Each group of twenty prisoners has a leader who must belong to the first category creatures still more sinister and cruel than the warders who appointed them, and more dangerous since warders do sleep at night, whereas these leaders, equipped with the title of guard helpers, are absolute masters of their groups, both physically and psychologically, and can exploit the other prisoners’ weaknesses without having to account for their actions to anyone. A group leader might, for example, organise a meeting about escaping the moment a shooting is over, asking each individual to admit to his own errors and delve into the deepest recesses of his mind to find the merest shadow of longing to escape. The leader has the right to decide whether a nocturnal meeting like this takes place with or without the lights on, and, when it happens in the dark, it often turns into sessions of common criminals beating up the “thought criminals,” because as soon as one of the latter opens his mouth, he can barely get three sentences out before he is assailed by black shadows that spring from every direction, his fellow prisoners in the first category jumping onto him,