rom where he lay, the mountain rose in waves of steel. He was conscious of the vibrations that were growing heavier, more solid. The boy took a deep breath. He was weary but roused himself and began climbing, or stumbling, over the blazing ridges which shone in a dazzling dance of light with the brilliant radiance of countless suns. From time to time his smouldering eyes glanced up from their charred sockets at the mountain’s summit, while plumes of dust rose like smoke.He continued his slithery journey into the narrowing perspective, clambering over the bulbous metal’s treacherous smoothness in a pair of worn boots shod with tremendous nails, while the mountain continued to rise, increasing breathlessness, tearing at ankles. Climbing around tangles of wire which threatened to enmesh him, their pointed barbs wreathing and intertwining, the mountain glittered more perilously as he grappled with it’s unorthodox angles; clawing, hauling, groping frantically in the searing, vibrating light.Where paint had blistered on moss-encrusted aluminium, thorns sprang up beneath his fingers. The chipped surface was terrible. But the youth finally reached the summit and was initiated to secrets he had never suspected. Because he had visualised it otherwise, his weary rather bitter face began to glow with joy.
The sky was a blaze of gold, gilded with silver clouds that were yet manifold in their variety, while the all-pervasive light emanating from this radiant cluster poured forth in cascades of shimmering exaltation down the mountain’s sides. The scintillating sparks set off by the sun’s rays, striking a million little mirrors of tin, filtered sensually through the brutal imagery. In the burnished light, the vulgar gloss became illuminated. Time is annihilated by such intimate glimpses. As atoms danced, filling the air with pin-pricks of light, a shiver of recognition ran through the youth. And in that moment he experienced such enchantment at the vast silence, a peace so deep that anything
that was not peace melted into it. There is a moment when silence no longer resists rushes to the mind and one lets go inch by inch of the desperate clutching, so that the moment seemed to last forever and the permanence of iron was myth.
From where he stood, he could see all the way to the signal box at the station on Raglan Street. When he turned right round, he could see the fields of Hampstead Heath. When he looked left he could see up Highgate Road. He smiled and squinted, his gaze following the twelve-foot high perimeter fence until his eyes finally settled on the area around the main gate, where a brick building stood, occupied by the Wharf Superintendent, whose job it was to check the weight of incoming and outgoing vehicles. The building also housed a couple of railway coppers. Along with a dark grey German shepherd (a long, lean, hungry brute) one of them would check anyone walking in or out of the railway sidings. Those that ran he left to the dog. The other policeman would patrol the perimeter fence.
- He ran, giddy-legged now, along the uneven metal crown, stopping in the middle erect and proud to survey his new domain. Glancing forward into a region where possibility crystallised great clusters of ball bearings into precious stones, out of this would grow the purpose of his being. He stood against a slab of shadow, remote yet present, eyes fixed on future pleasures among iron and steel that had turned to light and shadow, strangely silhouetted against the rim of the sky, in a smell of oil and battered metal.
The born observer is never self-conscious about his method. If you ask him, he would say that he merely makes as little fuss as possible and keeps his eyes open. Michael Docherty was such a one. Like the wolf, he moved now across the face of the metal landscape, soft and wary. He knew that this mountain contained infinite possibilities. He knew more by instinct than by cold, calculating reason that if he searched properly he would find gold, or (more precisely) precious metals.Some held that all metals would be gold if they could be, but were prevented by the impurities of the earth. Like some divine vastness, however far he saw, there was always more ahead. Such was the pervasiveness of the metal mountain. The great thing loomed and brooded — at times dense and sullen, at others opalescent, but always enticing. He was like an explorer walking into a landscape that might prove mirage. Nonetheless, the youth was sure this landscape was real, one that held beneath its enamelled armature many rare and varied treasures.
He began immediately, lured by a pleasure that was as hard as pain, into making sure that his boss never got a moment’s break; because he would never leave old Pop without a surplus of metal to be cutting up, while he himself searched high and low from morn til night for precious scraps. Not the obvious kind, such as bronze, gun metal or heavy lead, which, quite apart from their weight, are far too bulky to transport.Instead, Michael found himself thinking more of certain types of screws and castors, electric cables of thin copper wire, others full of aluminium, warped and twisted, lying amongst the rusting iron like coiled reptiles; wooden doors with brass locks and hinges, grey-blue pipes, sheets and lumps of zinc which could be cut into small pieces quite easily.Nothing was too much trouble. He found some old ammunition boxes, and into these he placed the metal, separated according to type.
Like any mountain, this one had its sheer drops and jagged edges and the whole mass was in a permanent state of flux. In his constant search for precious metals, Michael learned to avoid pretty patches of flowering shrubs and grass like quicksand. Wherever birds and wind had carried seeds, these treacherous oases sprung up in hollows full of crushed and broken debris, red-rotten with rust, which the slightest pressure would turn to powdered dust, plunging the unwary to the rusting depths below.
Illustration Sam Glynn
John Healy is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Grass Arena and a former chess tournament master. The Metal Mountain is an as yet unpublished novel set amongst the Irish immigrant community in London after the Second World War. Read our interview with John
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