Sleeping Stones extract: inside the Mines of Potosi

The world is tired when it reaches altitudes of 4000m or thereabouts. The land is drained of colour from the earth’s exertions at reaching these heights. For the most part, this rust coloured, windswept plateau in the High Andes of Bolivia is flat, and without any distinctive features. Missing butterflies, birds or flowers, a sadness hangs over this silent and lonely landscape. On the road North, I could see the odd farmer trying to coax food out of the stony earth. As far as I could see, the timeless Andean village life centred on alpacas and potatoes was little different today. That is until you reach Potosi. Upon the stark, exhausted altiplano, a pyramid-shaped mountain rears up, capping the miles of desolate land. As you get closer, you can see the scale of the city that impossibly exists in its shadow. Even now, it seems like a wonder, but in the 1700s it was a miracle. This lonely peak, called the Cerro Rico (rich hill) once housed the largest city in the Western hemisphere, with 120,000 souls, far overshadowing Boston and New York. These thousands were drawn by something out of the imagination of Tolkien, the world’s largest-ever silver mine, a hoard that made some incomprehensibly rich, but also forced many more to their deaths inside the mines.

These mines were where I soon found myself. I was crawling through a shaft barely shoulder width, the outline of a vein of silver that tumbled into the bowels of the Cerro. My only view was the soles of my guide Sergio’s rubber boots, flickering in the beam of my headlamp. I was surrounded by thousands of tonnes of rock. The crushing weight of the mountain was something physical, that you could touch and not just feel. If the mountain rumbled, just inches, we would be squished like insects. I kept crawling until I came upon a chamber housing a statue of El Tio. Horned, red, and beastlike, he was the very image of the devil we imagine.

El Tio lives in the earth with Pachamama, the great earth mother of Andean religion. Maybe because he only lives in the Cerro, he is affectionately called El Tio, or uncle. He is a God devoted to the miners and not to the whole world. Despite all appearances, he is not evil. He is a neutral god to be petitioned for help by those finding themselves far from the sun, more Hades of Ancient Greece than our Satan. He does however have the nasty habit of shaking the earth, crushing all in his kingdom if he does not regularly receive gifts. To his believers, he is even the source of the minerals mined within the Cerro by copulating with Pachamama and creating precious metals by doing so. The colonial miners believed, as some of their modern counterparts do, that they are essentially farmers, harvesting renewable materials, which just happens to come from earth gods having intercourse.

For his help in ensuring the safety of miners, he was garlanded in ribbons and honoured with a pile of coca leaves and spent beer cans. His open mouth bristled with cigarettes, I added one to his jaw and smoked another myself. So there I was, smoking a cigarette with the devil beneath the world’s richest mountain. It was an entry in my journal that left me brooding on all the steps in my life that led from attending a school in quaint Sussex to penning that sentence.

The statue itself is more than 300 years old, and still a genuine object of devotion for the miners. With Christianity reigning supreme above the ground, their conquered ancestors had begged favours from the subterranean god for centuries. Their sincere belief, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that Tio could preserve their life and limb burnt undimmed. That the floor was slick with the blood of a sacrificial llama attested to the force of this belief. Some take it even further, Emilio Alave, a Potosi folk hero who struck a rich vein of silver and made his fortune to escape the truncated life of a common miner is supposed to have sacrificed his son to Tio in thanks. It is said that he never re-entered the mine because he would hear his son’s screams echoing through the tunnels. Moved, but also feeling entirely detached from this alien world, I half ironically offered him a cookie for safe passage and maybe on the off chance finding a stray bit of silver ore. The cookie and cigarette were enough to escape death by rockfall but not enough for any silver.