Sometimes she is in the lower left-hand corner of Charlie’s photograph of the Serra Pelada mine, and sometimes she is at the bottom of the quarry. She has a sense of urgency about climbing up the rock face and escaping, but the ladder sways precariously and no matter how many rungs she negotiates, the top seems ever further and further away. She can never, in fact, see the top, only the endless vertical wall of pocked rock. Besides, it is dangerous even to look up, since throughout the dream it is raining birdshit from unseen birds. On her arms, in her hair, on the nape of her neck, running slimily down inside her clothes, she can feel the wet, viscous, ammoniac-smelling coating. When she looks up, it falls in her eyes, putrid. Knock, knock. An ordinary sound from the ordinary waking world invades the dream, and a door appears, dimly visible through ladder rungs, fantastically cut into the rock, neatly surrounded by pine mouldings and chipped white paint, its brass handle dinted with age.
