Tierra del Fuego Read Online Free Page B

trembling fingers and combed through it. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but his fingers told him it was true—it was iron oxide, the thin black sand typically found where there is gold. To Schaeffer, that bleak, remote area suddenly became the most beautiful, most attractive place on earth.
    Stroking the black sand in the hollow of his hand, he approached the hole from which it had come. The sand and gravel had already covered it over again, and he started scrabbling at the ground with both hands, as if trying to force his way through to the center of the earth.
    Reaching the bottom, his hands stopped as if they had grasped the world. With his fingers, he felt carefully below the ground, and recognized the velvety smoothness of the black sand. It was iron oxide all right, a substance so magnetic it had disoriented the compasses of the Nassau fleet, the first boats to drop anchor behind Cape Horn.
    Schaeffer sank his hand in as far as it would go, until he touched the edge of the vertebra from which he had freed the rib and, using his hand like a pickax, went on extracting the evocative substance. He tipped some of it into the palm of his hand, and started moving it around religiously, as if his hand were a small pan. He meticulously examined every last grain of sand, but there was no gold, it was pure iron oxide. With lethargic gestures, as if he did not want to let even that sand escape, he half opened his fingers and let the grains run through them, to be blown away on the breeze. Around him, the area was once again desolate, the beach turned grayer, the choppy sea grew hostile, and the sky, in spite of the flashes of light through the wind-torn clouds, was like a merciless eye staring down at the scene.
    But Schaeffer continued scrabbling away, now with his knife, now with his nails, like a frightened mole seeking refuge. He only stopped to wipe away the sweat, taking advantage of these moments to sift through the sand in his hand. In the end he had to admit failure, and he flung it away with a despondent cry of “Pure iron oxide!”
    Midway through the afternoon, not being hungry and not even aware that noon had passed, he started moving more of the ribs, but the results were the same. Already exhausted and irritable, he tried a smaller one. The sun, still advancing between patches of clear sky and banks of cloud like the soul of man, cast light and shade over the whole area.
    Tired, and with his nerves in shreds, he sat down again on a rib he had put down as a bench. He felt as weak as he had the night the bullet had gone through his leg. He looked at his leather coat, as crumpled as an old rag—exactly the way he himself felt, inside and out. But then, recovering, he again kneeled and started scrabbling, as if his life depended on it.
    The great gold nugget of the sun was starting to retreat to the black sands of night when its last long rays converged on a few little points of yellow light in the palm of Schaeffer’s hand. They were specks of gold, caught in his wrinkled skin when he blew away the darkness of the iron oxide!
    He looked at them for a long time, until the suspiciously transparent drop still hanging from the tip of his nose became distended and fell, melting on the flakes of gold. He rubbed his eyes, no longer to stop seeing visions, but because there were tears in them. It was a long time since those eyes had wept.
    The sun, as it went down, also left great nuggets of gold on the edge of the pan of the horizon—the golden cumulus that lit the ever-changing phantasmagoria of the Fuegian twilight.
    But Schaeffer did not see the sunset. For him the sun was still in his hand, it was the same color, the color of the most coveted and malleable of metals.
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    Julius Popper may have invented his famous gold harvester, yoking the gold of the sea to his own ingenuity, but, out there on that remote rim of Tierra del Fuego, nature had also devised its own harvester.
    It is a natural