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they passed into the surgery. A long table with a veined marble top stood in the centre of the room. There was a stone sink in the corner, and a row of shelves that glittered with the tools of a doctor’s trade – scalpels, knives and saws. There was only one window, high in the wall.
    The doctor told Wilson to lie on the table.
    â€˜There’s no cause for alarm,’ he said, white teeth showing in his smile. ‘I do not intend to operate.’
    Wilson gave himself up to the Frenchman’s hands, the same hands to which the President of the United States had been entrusted, even though he was dead. His head jangled. He could not tell whether it was the cactus liquor beginning to take its toll or the result of that fall from the balcony. He supposed that it might well be both.
    â€˜It’s a difficult business.’ The doctor was bending over Wilson’s foot, binding the ankle in tight bands of gauze. ‘The soil in this region is a soft, wet clay. Very unstable. Even with heavy timbering it can collapse.’ He began to apply plaster of Paris to the gauze. ‘But you, as a prospector, would have a better understanding than most of the perils involved.’
    â€˜I do most of my work on the surface,’ Wilson said. ‘I have come to mistrust tunnels.’
    â€˜Even so, I’m sure that you have witnessed many accidents.’
    Though Wilson had not, in fact, witnessed even a single accident, it seemed ungrateful, in the circumstances, to deny it. Accordingly, he recalled an incident where a man had fallen thirteen hundred feet to his death after being overpowered by a noxious gas. It had happened in Nevada.
    â€˜There,’ the doctor said. ‘You see?’
    Wilson lay motionless, content with the silence and the soothing coolness of the marble against his forearms and the back of his head. It did not seem to him that he had lied. He could still remember reading the article in the
Illustrated News.
The accident had been described in such a vivid and realistic style that he did honestly feel as if he had been there.
    While the plaster dried, the doctor left the room, returning some minutes later with a pair of wooden crutches.
    â€˜These will help you to move about,’ he said, ‘though I suspect you’ll find small spaces difficult.’
    â€˜Small spaces?’ Wilson peered at the doctor over his chest.
    â€˜Balconies, for example,’ the doctor said. He handed the crutches to Wilson, his lips tightening into a furtive smile.
    The hospital clock was striking midday when the two men left the building. They stood on the south veranda looking at the town below. The houses had roofs made from sheets of shining tin. The streets looked swept. But mesquite and ocotillo were beginning to disrupt the symmetry, and away to the east, where the mountains lifted steeply against the sky, Wilson could see a number of shanty dwellings pieced together out of driftwood, scrap metal, wild flag.
    His eyes shifted east, towards the waterfront. The ship that he had noticed earlier was now docking in the harbour. It was a freighter, out of Le Havre. You saw ships like it in every port from Seattle to New Orleans, carrying timber, grain or fruit. Three masts, a funnel that could use some paint, engines of low power. An ocean tramp.
    He watched the hawsers fly from the deck to the quay, where they were deftly looped through heavy iron rings. Coal barges were already nudging against the starboard bow. It did not look as if the ship would be in Santa Sofía for long.
    â€˜Do you know, Monsieur,’ the doctor said, ‘what is the cargo of that vessel?’
    Wilson did not.
    â€˜It’s a church.’
    â€˜A church?’
    The doctor’s smile broadened, but he chose not to elaborate. He too, it seemed, would have his mysteries.
    â€˜I’m afraid I must leave you,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I have other patients to attend