In four hours, more or less, Don Carlos Italla would fire his flare gun from the top of Alto Arete and the war masterminded from the clouds would commence. The only hope of stopping that signal was through the cave and up through the chimney. Even if we had had a military escort up the regular trail to the mountaintop, we still couldn't have made it on time. We were at one end of the shortest distance between two points. And there was water in the way. All right, I thought. Water certainly isn't impenetrable. "Let's move the slab all the way off the well," I said, "and get some light into the damned thing. I'm going down." "It is hopeless," Pico said. "We should spend our energies in returning to the tribal camp, in convincing Chief Botussin that we must move the camp farther into the hills, in…" "Let Senor Carter go down," Purano said. We all turned to look at him. He hadn't spoken five words during the whole of the afternoon, not even when the guerillas had attacked.
