Gold and Global Collapse

Hot and flushed, my heart was pumping hard to do the double task of cooling my body while providing continuous energy to my legs as I ploughed through the scratchy thickness of this south Pacific island jungle. My throat swollen and engorged from my body's effort to get blood to my brain, I struggled to breathe. Seeing a tiny clearing ahead, I slowed my pace for a moment anticipating a break in this forced walk, and immediately I felt the heaviness in my thighs and the weakness in my knees and ankles. A small patch of bright blue sky beamed through the opening in the immense green canopy surrounding and overtowering me.

I sank to my knees, pulled my water bottle out of my pack, guzzled down some of its coolness and poured more over my face to relieve the stinging and itching from the palm fronds scratching against my skin. The only direction from here was down as the broad landscape flowed towards its ending in the narrow crevice where a pool of cold, clear water lay embraced by its mountainous banks. It was on a ledge beneath and behind the narrow thousand foot falls cascading into this pool that I had hidden the gold and now I must, somehow retrieve it and return before I was discovered missing.

On the day of the collapse, we’d loaded up the stash of bullion onto the flatbed, breaking it out of the hole where I had it bricked up in my cellar. We’d taken the bars a few at a time from the vault at work when we realized the end was near. Getting to the edge of the valley of the falls was easy, but getting the gold down the mountain through the thick jungle was another story. John had devised a line and pulley system I won’t begin to describe here, because it is his area of expertise. Together we had sent load after load down the lines we’d poled to the base to get to the pool. Stacking them along the narrow bank, they'd laid in wait of the more labor intensive job of placing them on the ledge underwater behind the falls.