Timba Gold (standard:adventure, 2931 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Sep 09 2007	Views/Reads: 3315/2167	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A century ago, Colombia's Timba River was paved with gold. Today, only a few gold bars are left, buried under a sandy ridge -- and I've got the map.

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Sunlight glinted off their machetes once again. 

It was drudgery trudging over such uneven terrain.  Some acres of stone
piles sloped left, while others sloped right.  Each pile canted upward 
or downward.  Now and then, smooth stones like cannonballs would tumble 
down in a mini-avalanche. 

It took us an hour to straggle the next half-mile.  Gusts of sun-baked
wind cremated our faces.  Vivid blue-bottle gauze fluttered around our 
heads.  My hair felt like it was on fire and I quenched it in the 
whispering river.  A honey-mellow fragrance wafted up from bumblebee 
nests among the cairns, and the piercing essence of tangerine wafted in 
from groves behind the tall guadua stalks.  At long last, the stone 
piles began to diminish in height and finally they came to an end. We 
began edging downward toward the riverbank. 

We dug, the three of us, in ribbons of black silt below the site of the
old mill.  I filled two five-kilogram sacks with black, sandy ore from 
each pit.  Jorge plunged magnets into each sack and drew out samples of 
the ore, which hung like Blackbeard from each pole.  Rafael tied each 
sack tightly with wire.  I marked the labels and we left a row of sacks 
behind us, at paced-out intervals, for two miles along the Timba 
River's beach.  Ahead, the river's delta blended with the Rio Cauca, 
wide, swift, clean, deep, full of fish. 

It was far from dark when we ended this sampling run and crossed over
the bridge that spanned the black sands and the islands in the river. 
Rafael and Jorge guzzled soda-pop at the station hut, while I waited 
for my bus.  We agreed to meet tomorrow, after dawn, before sunrise, to 
go back and collect the bags.  I would hire a jeep to meet us at the 
bridge.  To seal our bargain, I left my flashlight with Rafael, while 
Jorge kept the pole and shovel. 

Soon the bus from Timba to Cali drew up.  I dug in my pocket for pesos
and centavos, shared the token coins with the boys, hoisted my knapsack 
with a few meticulously split samples and climbed up the steep, narrow 
steps into the bus.  I sank onto a back seat, exhausted, and felt a 
flood of emotion at the thought of returning home, to Cali. 

The bus shot along an asphalt road for half an hour, then onto the
unpaved strip in front of the guardhouse.  Here a chain stretched 
across the road that divided the Municipality from the countryside.  
These puny chains were all that remained of the walls, the turrets and 
battlements encircling the castles and towns and villages of Old Spain. 
 Here in New Spain, chains merely slowed the trickle of illicit liquors 
from one State to another.  A soldier stepped up to look in at the door 
and gabbled with the driver.  I couldn't hear what they said, but a 
moment later the bus was back on the paved road, heading northward, 
past the cane fields, past the bull ring, taking me home to Cali. 

It was nightfall when the bus left me at the station, and after eleven
when the taxi left me off at my apartment.  I watched a servant kissing 
her soldier-lover goodnight as I thrust my key harshly into the big 
brass lock.  Upstairs, I dumped the knapsack in a closet, stripped and 
hit the bed.  I smelled of mud and slime, dust and dung from the river. 
 Visions of black Timba gold teased my dreams as I fell asleep, helping 
me to forget  how alone I felt in this exotic valley of Eden's garden. 

The next day, I couldn't keep the boys away from that pool.  When I got
there, they had tugged out what looked like some square brass bars, 
each one about a meter long.  Their yellow sides glinted in the 
sunlight. 

"Muy, muy pesados, Senor," groaned Jorge, "very heavy". 

"They couldn't be that heavy," I replied.  Reaching down, I grabbed one
and it nearly yanked off my arm. It felt anchored to the ground.  It 
took the three of us to carry one bar up the bank and clean it off.  
The only yellow metal that  could be this heavy was gold!   I opened 
the sampling kit, took out the acids and the indicators and tested one 
spot.  It was gold.  I ran a hardness test.  It was gold.  I checked 
electrical properties.  It was gold.  Real Gold! 

We couldn't count how many bars were buried in the mud.  They were all
scattered out, beneath the surface of the pool.  A ship's ransom!  The 
jackpot!  Bingo! 

Compared to this, iron ore was worth peanuts.  Here was the real
treasure, half-buried for a century.  During the next four hours we dug 
and tugged and dragged and recovered 26 gold ingots!  Then we buried 
them beneath a sandy overhang twenty meters up the beach.  The rest of 
the bars were too deep to recover.  We would have to return with some 
tackle, and a boat. 

Ninety years ago, giant dredges had sifted the riverbed, sniffing for
gold.  Feeding on the slime, they left an ever-increasing ledge of 
stony excrement.  After sucking up the muck with its cutter head, each 
dredge spewed the sludge over trommels, colanders and sieves, which 
shook and rattled until the rounded stones rolled back out into the 
river, hence the stone piles. 

Meanwhile, the miners flushed the gravel, sand, mud, black ore and
hidden gold into barges, towing them downstream to the mill.  They used 
to sluice the slate-black slurry through massive tubes, over weirs, 
onto spiral concentrators.  When the mud and silt were washed away, 
when all of the gangue was discarded, the residue was heavy with gold 
flakes and gold nuggets. 

Every few weeks a smelter barge came up the river and melted down the
raw gold.  Flames lit up the sky and smoke poured from the furnace 
chimney.  When the smelter barge left this river for the next one up 
the coast, it also left behind a few hundred-kilogram (100 kg) gold 
bars, which were dutifully inspected and stamped by the inspectors, 
then loaded on pack horses for the three-week journey up-mountain to 
Bogotá.  And, in the end, all the gold was plucked from the riverbed.  
Almost all. 

A war with Peru finally interfered with dredging and smelting so the
miners dismantled the dredges, hauled away the barges and the hoses and 
went off to fight.  All they left were these piles of stones, tons of 
broken tools and    a few bars of gold buried in the mud.  Until now. 

With our treasure safely cached in a dune high above the river, we
rested, bathed and shared the rations in my backpack.  I drew up a 
crude map on a piece of wrapping paper, signed and dated it together 
with the initials of my two witnesses.  We agreed on a fair split of 
the profits, shook hands on the deal and headed for the bus stop.  It 
was just before sunset as I sank back exhausted, heading back home to 
Cali. 

Cali was a rose blown on tendrils of Pacific breeze; scented with
crushed blossoms; redolent of sweet young people blending with cologne; 
aromatized by baking yucca flower and goat-cheese; perfumed by roasting 
coffee; reeking of bacalao, that fearless river-fish, bigger than the 
fisherman. 

Cali's breath never knew the fetor of chimney smoke.  The Pacific wind
blew from the west, and all her factories lay to the east. Even here, 
sachet of champaca-oil soap and lavender lotion, bay-rum and heliotrope 
attest to the cosmetic plants; fruity, lemony gelatin-smells came from 
a dessert-mill; and a sugary mist flowed endlessly from hundreds of 
square miles of sugar plantations around her. 

Cali, the temple of scent, sensuous earth, stones and river, fragrant
with bull-droppings and new-mown llano-grass; fragrant in this alley 
and putrid in the next, contrasting myrrh and jasmine with the foul 
stench of rancid butter.  Zesty, savory bunuelos, fresh from the oven; 
whiffs of balsam from her hair-shops, her coiffure-palaces, her temples 
of women.  And carried on the balsam, each woman wafts a hint of civet, 
a subtle come-on like musk, or exotic bergamot. 

Cali nestled twinkling between the hills, radiating eastward to the
Cauca, profiled by a cloudless moon.  As I walk her leaf-laden streets, 
the ghosts of the first Calenos pass through me.  They are, I feel, 
very excited about the find -- a wide river, clean water and marvelous 
grazing land for the horses.  And the ghost of the architect who 
erected the Teatro Nacional. 

Last year, I left my Northern city to come south, three thousand miles.
Here I found a home in this simple city of the Cauca Valley plain.  It 
was not a Capital city like Bogotá, full of flashing lights, shiny 
taxis, glass buildings, daring miracles of architecture, bustling 
commerce.  My first impressions were of wrinkled old women leaning 
against the curb, toting coarse-woven sacks full of dirty roots, 
waiting for the next bus, wringing their souls out over trash.  Trash 
littered everywhere, kicked and trod by ragged, barefoot urchins who 
roved the streets at random, reeking of stale sweat and dead beer.  
Lofty trees scattered purple blossoms among the garbage shreds. 

Cali seemed to me a city of junk and old boats, especially down by the
river at Jamundi.  I was appalled by shaggy caves clinging to rocky 
steeps on Siloe mountain, hopeless coal mining homes, carved out of the 
soil, rippled black with soot.  The warped boards of every shack were 
open to the weather.  And below the mountain were dead mine trains, 
corroding into the old steel tracks, half-drowned in acid water where 
rotting ties had sunk into the belch-black mud. 

But it was a year later, now.  I looked forward to each Cali morn,
bursting out of the cane fields and rising high above the new soccer 
stadium.  Flowers drifted in my window after each rainfall.  Barking 
dogs vied with household roosters to announce each new day.  The rubber 
heels of neighbors squeaked on polished floor tiles down the hall and 
past my door.  The swell of morning sound was punctuated with the swish 
of a caretaker's broom, the chatter of a hungry squirrel, the distinct 
bleat of horns from buses racing each other through the narrow streets. 
 The one-time ragged hags who scrabbled for centavos in alleys had 
faded into background impressions, along with the leafy palms, adorned 
with coconut buds, flowers and bird droppings. 

I relaxed in the caress of Cali at sunset.  To my left, glorious golden
green sunbeams burst from behind the sky-jagged peaks of Western 
mountains, which crumbled downward to the Pacific Coast on the other 
side.  Fire-orange reflections flickered up the sides of towering 
clouds, with bird-shadows fluttering across them in the sun's last 
descending rays.  And beyond glowed a tender aura of violet tinged with 
hints of pale yellow-green, fading dust-blue, streaked with white, 
distantly echoing the ripple of cool rivers tinkling sonorously down 
from the mountain chain into the valley shade.  And, approaching Cali, 
I would feel the bolts of blood-red sun blasting through jagged passes 
in the black-green hills, painting sky-castles with a bold brush, 
causing the mountain shadow to loom over the red-tiled roofs until, 
suddenly, all became ashes, leaving nothing except the silhouette of 
evening trees against a deep-blue dusk. 

Some nights I loved to sit beneath the statue of Belalcazar, on the hill
above the water works, and watch Cali glowing like a jewel between the 
cleft of hills, with a sugary green glow extending to the valley cane 
fields. 

At the City Limits, I remembered, it was the Day of the Immaculate
Conception.  The bus trampled over loud-snapping torpedoes chucked 
beneath the wheels by playful children.  Below the fringe of low hills 
on my right, fat white cattle grazed.  White long-necked Garza-birds 
perched on their rumps.  Beside the road, one hut after another sat at 
the fringe of a cornfield or a cane field or a cotton field.  Beside a 
clump of sparse woodland, bent hags staggered under bundles of cut 
branches.  Their brown cassocks had no capes.  They cackled mirthlessly 
to each other as we passed. 

The bus lurched on past tractors, taxis, tri-wheel trucks.  Now and then
a motorcycle would pass the bus.  A bicycle was lying in the road, so 
the bus driver went up onto the sidewalk to avoid crushing it. 

Blossoms of every color sprout and flutter from the trees.  Their petals
float in the sea-breeze sweeping over the mountain crest, littering the 
road beneath our wheels.  Frost twinkles from a peak in the Central 
Cordillera mountain range. 

A wrinkled, tight-lipped, hoary old woman sits beside me, her earthy
skin furrowed with a century of conflict, concern, and cancer.  She 
peeks at me out of the corner of her beaded Indian eyes, over the stiff 
white collar of her flower-printed dress, wide with petticoats and 
ruffles in chic fashion, hinting at an unforgotten youth. 

Nuns in square white hats shade their sombre brows and browse drowsily
through their prayer-books as the Eternal Bus rumbles its way along 
paper-strewn side streets, where the poorest children wear the widest 
smiles.  On this day of the Immaculate Conception, I wonder if, 
perhaps, they too were immaculately conceived. 

Downtown Cali sounds like a busy wind.  My bus accelerates; it's exhaust
goes "pop-pop" as it jerks to a stop.  Vendors surround us on all 
sides, offering ice cream, cookies, soft drinks.  The pot vendor calls, 
"Ollas!, Ollas!",  the pineapple vendor calls, "Pina, Pina", the culo 
vendor calls, "Hola, guapo!  Adonde vas?" 

I climb the stairs to my little bare pad, hit the sack and dream the
dreams that only dreamers dream.  Tomorrow, I will register the claim. 

Seattle  1989 Gerald X. Diamond All rights reserved


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