« p. 82-85: The Thundering Water on Sunday
On Monday
p. 86-88
I hear the thundering waters again on Monday, but this time the noise comes from the kraftstation, the power station, on the American side. Until our guide arrives, we were allowed to stand alone at the entrance of the giant structure. And I’m standing there now.
In front of me, it looks like an entire ship has been brought together into a single space, machine rooms, command bridges, everything in a giant box of heavy gray stone and glass. But everything inside is black and white. The eleven generators stand in a row and gyrate madly on their axes. There are black, stocky, round steel towers, looking like spirit stoves that could fit about fifty men standing upright, but right now their bodies contain only 5500 horsepower. The spirit stoves spin insanely. You can see floating parallel lines, as if you were looking at a fan. Way down below, the turbines drive the spinning, turbines which harness the power of the rushing water. Now we climb down to the source of the power and listen with our own ears to the vibrating of the running stream against cliff and steel.
One turbine is being repaired, and in the middle of the abyss, a hollow chimney that makes you shiver from just looking up into it, in the dizzying heights above our heads, a slender wooden scaffolding stands. On the scaffolding stands a ladder, and on the ladder stands a man.
Beneath him, seventy feet of darkness, and beneath these seventy feet, the water roars and rages, being about fifty feet deep at this point.
As my group went on following the loud shouting of the guide from turbine to turbine, I stayed there, on the slender footbridge on the side of the abyss, staring at the man above me.
A small light bulb inadequately illuminates the wooden scaffolding, the wooden ladder and the figure of the man himself. After awhile, my eyes adjust themselves to the dark, and I look up more certainly.
He stands with a posture that is difficult to describe. His feet are pushed together tightly on a rung of the ladder. He stretches his arms out horizontally to the right and left, his hands reaching for the steel and stone on both sides. He throws his head back, he looks up and tries to find something in the heights above him. That’s how he stands on his wooden ladder above the abyss. Now I can even make out his blue shirt and corduroy pants. He stands there above the abyss and works for the power. He stands alone and works for the power that will drive the machines in the factories of this country. Our guide yells at me and tells me I can’t stay there anymore. Still, I look up one more time and memorize the picture of this lonely thing, this worker, this man standing between the abysses, whose life, dimly illuminated, powers the work of this country on a thin, swaying ladder. Walking forward, I ask myself if I haven’t just seen a vision of the crucifixion. --
Back in daylight, in the black and white hall, a young lad stands, not much older than twenty-three or twenty-four. He stands on the command bridge along the generators, next to the steel levers of the conductors, somewhat like a railroad attendant. He’s a young lad, he has adapted well to the job, and his sweating, intelligent face is drenched in attentiveness. To the side of the conductors, a thin strip of paper rolls out of a small glass box. A red zigzag line runs across the strip. It’s the wattage report.
I look at the working lads and then the strip of paper winding its way out of the glass box. It seems to me and my pathetic notebook, as if I myself am sitting in the glass box and drawing an imprecise red zigzag line as the continent actively and attentively accomplishes its hard work. I’d rather not talk about this subject any more.