Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Borglum is sixty-nine years old this August day as he rides to the summit of the mountain with the powderman he thinks of as Billy Slovak, just two years younger than Paha Sapa, and thus far three of the four great Heads have emerged from the stone, and these only partially. The sculptor plans to reveal much of their upper bodies and some arms and hands. And Borglum has more ambitious plans for the mountain—the Entablature, the Hall of Records. Gigantic projects in and of themselves. But Paha Sapa knows that Borglum has no worries about his age or health or about time itself; Borglum, he knows, plans to live forever.

THEY REACH THE TOP and step out of the cage and Borglum strides to where some of the boys have spent the day preparing the framework and armature of the crane that will drape the huge American flag over Jefferson and then lift and swing the flag back to reveal the head. The sculptor is talking, but Paha Sapa keeps walking along the ridgeline, past the crane and Jefferson.

From up here, one can see—feel—how very narrow the ridge of rock is between the blasted-in trough in which three of the four heads are emerging and the unseen wall of the canyon behind this ridge. When—if—the Teddy Roosevelt head is finished, the ledge between the carved face on one side and the vertical drop to the canyon on the other side will be narrow enough that it might make people nervous to stand on it.

Paha Sapa sees the crevice in the rock and the patch of soil where he dug his Vision Pit sixty years minus two days earlier. He continues along the ridge to the northwest.

Atop the heavily faulted knobs along the ridge above where the four heads are emerging, there’s a small village of structures—wooden cranes, winches, winch houses, stairways spidering up and down the rocky knobs, wooden platforms, A-frame supports for the tramway and other devices, the vertical mast and the horizontal boom of the pointing machine that translates the scale models in Borglum’s studio below into the carving on the actual mountain. There is also one shack big enough for some of the men to crowd into during lightning storms or hail, outhouses, and various storehouses, including one set apart just for dynamite storage. (Paha Sapa has considered storing his extra twenty crates of dynamite there, of course, but the chances of it being discovered, even in just the one day he needs before deploying the charges, are simply too great. Alfred Berg, “Spot” Denton, and the other powdermen are in and out of there all the time.)

Far along the ridge, all by itself, is one small exposed post and steel winch platform. It’s smaller than all the ones clustered above the heads and it’s on the wrong side of the ridge, overhanging the vertical drop into the narrow dead-end canyon that lies behind the visible face of what the wasichu insist on calling Mount Rushmore.

Paha Sapa steps out onto the platform. The two-hundred-foot drop is precipitous and somehow seems worse than the exposure on the south face where the heads are emerging. The canyon below is narrow, claustrophobic even to look down into, and littered with massive tumbled boulders. The evening shadows have filled almost all of the narrow defile now, but Paha Sapa can still make out what he’s come to see: on the opposite wall of the granite cliff, far below, there is a single square—no, a rectangle—of black, five feet tall by six feet wide, almost lost to the shadows.

Paha Sapa knows what it is because he helped blast it out the previous autumn: a twenty-foot test shaft for Borglum’s future Hall of Records.

He suddenly feels the sculptor standing close behind him.

— Damn it, Billy. What are you doing farting around over here?

— Just thinking about the Hall of Records, Boss.

— Why? We won’t get to it until next year. Maybe the year after that.

— Yes, but I’m trying to remember all the things you said about it, Mr. Borglum. How deep it’ll go. What’ll be in it.

Borglum squints at him. The sculptor is looking directly into the setting sun, but much of the squint is suspicion.

— Damn it, Old Man. Are you getting senile on me already?

Paha Sapa shrugs. His gaze goes back to the tiny black rectangle more than two hundred feet below.

But Borglum cannot resist giving a speech.

— Next to the carvings themselves, Billy, the Hall of Records will be the greatest thing in America. There’s going to be a grand stairway—broad, majestic, carved out of white granite—coming all the way up from the valley and into and up the canyon itself, with level areas with benches so that people can rest along the way and observe various statues and historical markers. We’re going to have busts of famous Americans—some of you Indians included, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, whatshername, the girl that went with Lewis and Clark—lining the grand stairway all the way up and into the canyon. It’ll be lighted at night… glorious! Then, just when the people think it can’t get any more glorious, they’ll come to the Hall of Records itself… there, right down there where I had you and Merle and the others open that test shaft. The hall’s entrance will be a single polished-stone panel forty feet high. It’ll have inlaid mosaics made from gold and the world’s best lapus lazuli, and the mosaics surmounted by a symbol of the United States of America… maybe it’s a symbol of your people as well… a single bas-relief American eagle with a wingspread of thirty-nine feet. Then the door itself, the entrance… it’ll be some twenty feet high by fourteen feet wide… they’ll be cast-glass doors, Billy, transparent but as permanent as the mountain. Those doors’ll open into the high chamber, which will be eighty feet wide and a hundred feet long. There’ll be three hundred and sixty feet of wall space in that high chamber and all of it beautifully paneled and recessed to a depth of thirty inches. There’ll be permanent indirect lighting there. It’ll be beautiful day or night. Into those recesses will be built illuminated bronze-and-glass cabinets in which we’ll place all the records of the United States… hell, of the Western World, of civilization itself… the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address… all of it… and not just political stuff, Billy, but all the documents that show the glory of our civilization, show it to people and people’s descendants a thousand and ten thousand and a hundred thousand and five hundred thousand years from now: documents of science and art and literature and invention and medicine. I know what you’re thinking—that paper documents like that don’t last thousands of years, much less hundreds of thousands. That’s why all these documents, the Declaration, the Constitution, all of them, are going to be typed up onto and into sheets of aluminum and then rolled and protected in tubes of alloyed steel that’ll last damn near forever. We’ll seal those cabinets… hell, I don’t know when, nineteen forty-eight maybe, or fifty-eight, or sixty-five, I don’t care… but I plan to be here, trust me on that… and once sealed, those cabinets will be opened only by an act of Congress… if Congress lasts that long, which I heartily doubt. And on the wall above those cabinets, Billy, extending around the entire long hall, there’s going to be a bas-relief, carved into bronze and plated with gold, that will show the whole adventure of humanity discovering and occupying and building up and perfecting the western world… us, our United States of America. And beyond that first main hallway there are going to be wide, brightly lighted tunnels going to more rooms and repositories, each one illustrated with its own murals, each one dedicated to a specific aspect of our time and glory… maybe even a room for statues of women who’ve made something of themselves, even just pests, like that Susan B. Anthony that those damned feminists keep demanding I carve there next to Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln…. I tell them the truth, that we’re out of good carving rock there forever, Billy, but down here in the Hall of Records, for generations, for centuries…