51.

Caleb was already out of the Land Cruiser when I woke up properly, morning having broken. He was sitting on the truck’s running board opposite Francis, who was squatting in the dirt. The driver had already boiled a pan of water over a little propane stove. He passed me a cup of tea so full of sugar you could pretty much have stood up a spoon in it, and in case that wasn’t sweet enough his idea of provisions for this trip was plastic-wrapped chocolate biscuits. Lots of them. He’d brought a big box and, as far as I could see, nothing else. I was so hungry I ate about ten and shoved more in my pockets.

‘Francis knows people here,’ Caleb told me as I munched. ‘If your parents have been through, they’ll tell us.’

As if on cue, a group of men and women appeared up the track, walking unhurriedly towards us. Each of them was carrying something. The guy in the lead had a spade over his shoulder, the one next to him was lugging a load of hessian sacks rolled up under his arm, and the skinny woman bringing up the rear of this first team was carrying a pickaxe. Another couple of shovels followed in the next knot of men. Also a crowbar slung from a rope. More bags on the back of a guy with torn, dirt-smeared shorts. Everyone’s clothes were filthy in fact. Holey T-shirts, mismatched gumboots, bare feet. a boy there who looked not much older than me had a Make America Great Again cap on, its stained brim angled comically to the sky. Where had he got that from? None of these guys were wasting breath talking to one another, and they didn’t say anything to us either. They already looked exhausted. When they reached the junction we’d parked at they simply turned downhill, one or two of them eyeing the Land Cruiser uncertainly. I took a photograph of the group before a bend in the track folded them out of sight. As the last of the men rounded it I had an absurd urge to whistle the tune the seven dwarfs sing when they say goodbye to Snow White and head off to work. If Xander had been there I’d probably have followed through. He would have understood.

‘What do we do now?’ I said instead.

‘Nous les suivons,’ said Marcel, dusting himself down.

‘How far is it?’ asked Amelia.

As another gaggle of men appeared up the track, Caleb said, ‘The mine’s close, a short walk. Some of these guys will have trekked for a couple of hours in the dark to get here this morning.’

We fell in behind this group. The path was well worn, steep in places, a yellow scar cut through the undergrowth. It wasn’t the only route down to the mine. We’d been walking just fifteen minutes when another path joined ours, and when the great gash of the mine opened up ahead of us it was obvious you could come in from the other side too.

The place was alive with activity. A swarm of men and women, more than a hundred of them, were already hard at work on the tiered, filthy plateau cut away beneath us. The expanse of raw dirt was at least ten times the size of the football pitch at school, ragged edged, multi-levelled, a great scab picked off the face of the earth. When I say men and women hard at work, I mean exactly that: everywhere I looked men were wielding shovels and picks and filling bags with dirt and hefting those bags this way and that, heaping them in little pyramids down below for other men to lug up to that lip while yet more men hacked rock from the wall over there for others to shovel into heaps to be picked through by … my eyes snagged on the four little guys at work not fifty metres away.

They weren’t little men; they were children.

And in fact, looking harder at the scene, there were other children, kids way younger than me, at work among the adults. Instinctively I stepped forward, camera raised, to take a closer look, but I hadn’t taken many shots or steps before a man with his back to me cradling his shovel in his arms turned round to reveal that the shovel was in fact a rifle. Seeing me advancing, with Caleb and Amelia just a few metres behind me, as pinkly out of place as I was, , he shouted something unintelligible in French. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand him, because he brought his gun up onto his hip at the same time, making it very clear that if I took another step he’d shoot.