George Washington's Ghost

Chapter 2

Saturday 22nd April

El Ojo del Diablo, Provincia Norteña de Sonora

Eyebrows had been raised among his colleagues back at the University of Cuernavaca at El Departamento de Geología de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias Naturales – the Geological Department of the National Academy for the Natural Sciences – when Professor Rodrigo de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, despite being six years past the customary ‘active service’ cut-off point of fifty-five years of age, had volunteered for active military service last year.

He was still the tall, broad-shouldered, rangy man he had been in his prime except, inevitably, not so fleet of foot and he ached in the mornings, and was sometimes, stooped with weariness. His formerly dark head of hair was ever-more streaked with grey, and his face, darkened by the Aztec ancestry that had long been ingrained in all but the most recent generations of migrants from Old Spain, was lined and weathered, set around grey brown eyes which had retained their capacity to unexpectedly twinkle with rueful mischief.

Inevitably, many of his oldest friends, and to a man, the majority of the Fellows in his departmental common room who had arched eyebrows, suspected some unseemly military fervour had gripped their esteemed Dean, whom everybody had assumed had long since bidden farewell to the warrior mantle.

True, Rodrigo was a hero of each of the three most recent wars with the gringo interlopers of New England; last time around, back in the 1960s he had been captured and held by the ungodly, for nearly a year as the bickering about the so-called ‘de-militarised zone’ dragged on interminably.

It was also true that although he still proudly retained the rank of Teniente Coronel – Lieutenant Colonel – in the Reserve Forces of the Ejército de Nueva España (the Army of New Spain), notwithstanding his long friendship with Army Chief of Staff Felipe Santa Anna – with whom he had fought beside in two of those wars – for several years after the last war had been a prominent, albeit gentlemanly, voice in the Peace Movement, a veritable thorn in the side of successive regimes in México City.

In fact, Rodrigo had been hard-pressed to explain to his wife, Magdalena, why he felt he had to return to the colours. In the end he had had to tell her exactly why he seemed to have ‘gone loco’. Only then had she understood; afterwards, she had spoken of it no more.

Other, that was than to observe, tartly: ‘If you go and get yourself killed, I will never forgive you!’

Which, all things considered, was fair enough.

However, once Rodrigo had learned of the fragmented. frightening stories coming out of the Colorado country, far to the north of the 1964 ‘border’, and beyond the twenty to thirty mile-wide DMZ, in reality a skirmishing zone for raiders and bandits from both sides, he had been inexorably drawn back to the harsh landscapes in which he had made his academic name, prospecting and studying, in his rebellious younger years.

His now famous paper about El Ojo del Diablo – the Eye of the Devil – a massive meteoritic impact crater, had eventually established him as Nuevo Granada’s, México’s, leading geologist. Located at an elevation of over five thousand feet on the great sandstone plateau of the northern Sonora badlands, although eroded by wind and rain for countless millennia and partly filled by drifting sand, El Ojo del Diablo was still three-quarters of a mile across and over five-hundred-feet deep, and its rim still reared, in places some one-hundred-and-fifty feet above the surrounding desert. If ever a man needed to be reminded that his life was but a miniscule mote in the eye of a greater god, he could do no better than stand on the edge of the Eye of the Devil and look down into the void.

Rodrigo had been only twenty-six when he first trekked north into the then ‘disputed lands’ – turned into ‘borderlands’ and then ‘buffer zones’ and finally incorporated into the Commonwealth of New England by the victorious gringos in treaties signed after each successively more humiliating war – in search of adventure, knowledge and yes, if he was being honest about it, fame.

Those were halcyon, free-wheeling days before he had settled down with Magdalena, found academic respectability with his seminal published papers on the stratigraphy of the rocks of the middle and lower grandes acantilados – great cliffs – carved down through over a mile of rock over untold millennia by the Colorado River. As a young man he had been bewitched by the Eye of the Devil, assumed until then by generations of Granadan geologists to be a well-preserved, caldera-like feature associated with ancient volcanism because of its relative proximity to the San Franciscan ridges, themselves thought to be the remnants of ancient volcanoes, some forty miles to the west.