Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 by High Adventure (v1.1) Page A

thumb.
                 “Oh,
yes, I see where you are,” he said. When she lifted her thumb he moved the map
again, infinitesimally, raising his head to look down across his cheekbones,
pursing his lips. “But that’s,” he said, shaking his head. “No, no, that’s no
good.”
                 “It’s
there, I mean,” Valerie said, poking the map once more. “Yes, I see that, I see
what you have in mind,” he said, “but it’s not possible. You won’t find any
temples there .”
                 “Oh,
I’m certain I shall,” Valerie said, becoming more formal in the face of
opposition, wondering why this fellow was making trouble. She had heard that
some Third'World people wouldn’t cooperate unless they were given a bribe or a
tip; did this Vernon want money? Theoretically she understood the concept,
didn’t even have any true objection, but in real life she had never actually
bribed anyone, and she found herself now too embarrassed to make the attempt.
“I’m certain it’s there,” she insisted, thinking that Mr. St. Michael, when he
arrived, would be above such petty money schemes.
                 “But
it can’t be, Miss Greene, I’m sorry,” Vernon said. Moving across the room, he
gestured to her to follow, pointing at a large map on the side wall and saying,
“Let me show you on this topographical map.”
                 A
bit reluctantly, she crossed to stand beside him and watch his slender fingers
move across the map. “Here is your site,” he said. “You see how the higher land
is around your land on three sides?”
                 “The
mountains, yes,” Valerie said. “It’s just where the mountains start that we’ll find our settlement.”
                 “No,
I’m sorry,” he said, blinking at her somewhat owlishly, looking far too earnest
to be interested in bribes. “Something the map does not show,” he said, his fingers moving, “is an underground fault
that runs along just about here, under your site and east, coming out in these
two streams down here and this one over here. Now, the situation is,” he said,
taking a professorial stance, nodding at her, “all of these first line of
mountains here drain down through your parcel of land, all of them. It is the
narrow end of the funnel, you see, the bottleneck in the watershed.”
                 “I
don’t see what you’re getting at,” Valerie confessed. (She had now come to the
conclusion that he was, however misguided, essentially serious.)
                 “What
I’m getting at is,” he said, “in the rainy season, in the wet six months of the
year, this is all swamp through here, bog, simply impassable. There’s no way to
change it, not the sluice at the bottom of an entire watershed.” Then,
chuckling a bit, his pointing fingers making an arc westward of her site, he
said, “Oh, I suppose a billion dollars to put a dam across here between these
mountains might help a little, but even so it wouldn’t work, you’d still have
ground seepage, all these other mountains draining. So you see the difficulty;
for six months of the year, total swamp.”
                 “But
the Mayans specialized in clearing
swamp,” Valerie objected. “Along the coast, there are evidences of milpa farming two thousand years ago
where now it’s all swamp again.”
                 “The
Mayans never tried to divert the runoff from eleven mountains,” Vernon said
drily. “But even so, there’s the other problem, the underground fault. Without
it, your site would be perfectly fine, it would contain perhaps Belize’s only
lake, but as things are the land can’t retain the water, it all just runs right
through, to these two streams and that one. So, for the dry six months of the
year, the swamp becomes almost a desert. No lake, no water, nothing will grow,
nothing at all can exist there.” Tapping the map with his hard