Talara (standard:adventure, 2342 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 08 2007	Views/Reads: 3128/2154	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Magic sands are full of intriguing mystery. They compel even rational minds to bend, to lust after their hidden jewels.

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to be there.  Ramos smiled but refused to talk.  I wondered sometimes, 
if he might be playing the fool, blotting up the things Bill and I 
said, memorizing the things we did, so he could turn them against us if 
we ever let down our guard.  Sometimes he used to wear a ring of 
flowers around his neck so I could never know for sure what he was 
thinking. 

I slowed down and turned the truck off the road, choosing a slope to my
right.  We headed outward onto the center of the desert.  This 
hard-packed sand was treacherous with unmarked soft spots, and the 
trail we had been following was bulldozed and annointed with oil.  It 
had crusted over, forming a rutted road -- but on either side, the 
quicksand waited, like a dry quagmire, hungry for my tires and, 
perhaps, a taste of axle grease.  The road tacked back and forth, like 
a maze, so Bill called out and marked the map at every turn.  The 
patterns could be seen clearly from the air on the daily flight from 
Talara to Lima.  I kept the truck headed for the beach.  Ahead the 
dunes began. 

Black sand glinted in the sunlight now that all the mist had risen.  I
swung the truck around the pump house of an abandoned oil well and let 
the boys unload the sampling gear.  Meanwhile, I stopped to study the 
sand with a lens. 

Most of the grains were white.  I cupped the sand in my hand and blew
gently, a few puffs at a time.  Grain by grain, the silica rolled away, 
revealing a starry-black residue darkening the creases of my palm.  I 
drew a magnet close and -- with a startlingly human leap -- each 
particle of magnetite flew upward to cling to a pole.  The sand was 
rich in iron ore. 

Around us, pyramids of bone bespoke a lore forgotten long ago.  Beyond
them were piles of clamshells in windrows.  Hours passed in silence as 
we dug for samples, filling bag after bag with soggy black sand.  
Suddenly, behind the jagged metal hulk jutting awry from the shoreline, 
baroque red shafts of sunset glanced off the Pacific.  Deep in my 
cortex a mute tongue whispered "Go home, gringo -- safely, quickly, 
now." 

We had dug up the beach between Paita and Talara, this beach that angled
southeast along Peru's northernmost western coast.  Here, in the shadow 
of a wrecked vessel, we had come to dig.  Between each grain of sand 
nestled finer, tinier grains of iron ore -- a common ore, easy enough 
to find on any continent, always available at a price. 

Behind, on the salt flats, red oil leaching from the rigs and pumps
tinted the sand a deeper red than the sunset -- not blood, yet 
glistening like ichor.  The dunes here were degenerate: hummocks 
windblown in all directions, century after century, shifting with each 
current of the South Pacific.  Tufts of air grass grew atop each dune; 
the lumps resembled camel's humps. The sand itself was quicksilvery and 
heavy.  Pile it up with your hands, release and it would roll over 
itself with a dark chuckle, a secret whisper, as it blended into the 
rest of the beach.  Each grain of silica was rounded from mega 
centuries of rubbing against zircons and garnets, staurolite and 
pyroxenes, calcite, ilmenite, magnetite ... 

Let me tell you about this sand. 

It was not like the Arabian sands of Lawrence, nor was it the Sahara
sand of Antoine St.-Exupe:ry, not unicolored nor dappled, cream white, 
lying in rippled terraces lapping at North African oases -- no, not 
this sand. 

This sand was black.  Rather, it was slate-gray with an undertone of
platinum.  Even through a simple magnifying lens this sand could be 
distinguished as independent crystals, large and small, angular and 
blunt, each grain with its own character.  Big blocky grains of quartz, 
quadrangular, some fused by volcanic heat at the corners -- heat that 
gave birth to rocks that later weathered into sand.  Other grains 
flashed dagger edges, honed sharp as razors, striated with conchoidal 
hollows and warped facets in their crystalline walls.  These sands of 
silica were worthless because they were so common.  They made up most 
of the melange. 

But Silica's cousin, chunky coal-brown Ilmenite wore necklaces that
glittered at each interface, where Iron married with Titanium, daughter 
of Goddess Titania.  Tiny crystalline platelets of Alumina laughed and 
tumbled over each other.  Nuggets of red-orange Rutile sparked and 
receded like Betelgeuse.  Every shovelful of sand bore a dime's worth 
-- or more. 

Finer jewels took focus in my pocket microscope.  These came from crests
barely visible now against the lavender horizon clouds.  Here was a 
perfect Zircon, each sleek facet hard as Diamond and more brilliant.  
This one was Garnet, a scarlet darker than despair, tempered with Ocher 
the color of hope.  Green Pyroxenes, Olivine and other Irish grains 
bucked against one another, crowding out the little love-yellow 
inclusions of Leucoxene.  Beneath these, our quarry: Magnetite.  
Minuscule jet-black nuggets and chips that slipped through your fingers 
out of sight in a twinkling, elusive as guppies. 

These were the smallest grains, very nearly.  Even smaller were the
flecks of Monazite, grandmother of Thorium, second cousin to Osmium and 
to Uranium, father of Plutonium -- rare and heavy metals, full of 
sorcery, with the awesome power of outraged gods locked up inside. 

Beneath the crust of lesser sands, that dark shadow was Magnetite:
ferrous progenitor of Magick, brother to Hematite and Limonite, which 
fed the blast furnace stacks at Birmingham, Middletown, Gary, 
Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Essen and Kyoto -- wherever men smelted ore to 
bleed steel for people.  Magnetite, polarized with invisible energy, a 
myriad of minuscule force fields undetectable to eye or nose or ear.  
Magnetite, emanating a mysterious aura that permeated nearby grains; 
Magnetite striving to align northward and southward in obedience to 
earth's gravitational field. 

Was it Magnetite, indeed, who projected that subtle, irresistible love
call -- the one that drew me a third of the way round the world to 
worship?  Call it rape, then!  Sand, we're going to hold you for 
ransom.  We're going to taunt them with you till they're competing for 
highest bidder.  Sand, you are going to line our pockets with minted 
paper that has more power among men than his metal-gods and his machine 
servants.  Sand, if you hold only seven per cent iron, that's enough to 
build a whole Cadillac!  Lucky seven.  And if you had, maybe, ten per 
cent....A day's work with a hundred slaves and dredges would uncover 
enough ore to build a mile-long bridge.  We have become reapers of 
metal, sifting seeds of ore from the sterile, sandy chaff -- 
inseminating the industries of civilization, feeding peoples' voracious 
appetite for trucks and ships, buildings and hardware.  This steel 
would become meat, nourishing a need for self-realization in each human 
being: symbiotically urging new construction, reproducing until it 
becomes the superstructure, the enveloping skeleton of our society.  
Steel makers rule the earth! 

But I wonder: will the power and pre-eminence of steel in the hand of
mankind leave its imprint in living things after the next ice age 
rages?. 

Making steel wasn't our job, of course.  All we had to do was find the
pockets of ore, flush it down the beach into the ships moored at Paita, 
then go back and find more.  Someplace, somewhere on earth, mammoth 
blast furnaces towering twenty stories high would digest the brittle 
ore and excrete pig iron.  Men would accumulate the molten droppings in 
cauldrons vast as caves, purify the melt with Oxygen, and tap out 
white-hot steel for making rails and girders and beams and rods and 
bolts and nuts and wire and pins and needles. 

Bill went ahead of me over the dune's lip to the slick wet shore.  We
were alone.  Despite the dusk, our truck was visible behind a big dune 
on the rough road.  We stood and stretched our senses out along the 
shoreline and over the tide.  Was this track here a coyote print?  Were 
these deep symmetrical scratchings in the sand left by a giant crab?  
And at the edge of the receding water, as evening descended and a night 
breeze began to rise, clams abandoned by the waves settled into their 
sandy prisons. 

On our way back, as it grew darker, we trampled over moraine-high piles
of clamshells, keeping pace with the wind.  This was the wind that 
undermined the dunes and carried light sand back to the foothills, far 
ahead of us. 

It was almost too dark to see;  the red- and yellow truck lights were a
welcome sign.   We clambered up a final dune and scrambled down its lee 
side, gaining momentum, running for the truck, blind as moles in the 
sudden dark, our feet invisible beneath us. 

Inside the cab at last, Bill nestled close to me with a shiver, letting
Ramos slam the door. I turned the key and the engine came alive, 
roaring.  The other men were already in back, waiting.  We began to 
clump over the crude road. 

"The Indians," said Bill, speaking for the first time today in English,
"built bonfires here, leaving circular middens of cloven clamshells 
whose intestines were digested thirty centuries ago." 

This got to me.  How could a rude, hardened and brutal miner wax erudite
after a day full of dreary digging along kilometers of beach?  The 
truck tugged up the steep-sloping road onto the paving and headed for 
Talara. 

*    *    *    *    * Seattle WA Gerald X. Diamond Copyright 1990


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