Winter came, and Robledo had not yet accomplished enough to feel justified in leaving Buenos Aires. There were days when, in a sudden spurt of optimism, he had hopes of accomplishing his purpose within the week. But when, armed with a new argument, he presented himself at the government bureaus, he was met with the set phrase, “Come back tomorrow.” And the tomorrow they meant, as he came to discover, was not the tomorrow following today, but something vague and nebulous in the future, a tomorrow that would never dawn.
One morning the papers brought news of the uneasiness felt in the river towns, at the unprecedentedly rapid rise of the Rio Negro. The tributary streams were all bringing down enormous quantities of water and it seemed impossible that the banks of the larger stream should be able to contain the rapidly rising torrent. And this was the state of things that he had come to warn the government about, this was the condition that his dam, had it been nearer completion, would have been able to control!
Then came a telegram from his friends in La Presa, excitedly imploring that he come back, as though his presence possessed a miraculous power over the forces of nature itself.
He reached the town during a spell of icy cold that made him shiver in the fur-lined coat he had worn during the sharpest days of the winter. The streets of the town were deserted. The houses of wooden construction, best fitted to keep out the cold, kept their windows and doors tight shut. The roofs of the adobe buildings were crumbling, and the hurricanes from the plateau-lands had torn out the wooden frames of the windows. There was no one in sight! The only inhabitants of the place were those who had been there before the dam had been begun. To the engineer’s eyes the place looked as though ten years had elapsed since he had left it.
For days at a time he stood on the bank watching the growing volume of water in the great stream. Then the current began bringing down trees from the upper reaches of the river, and Robledo’s helpless indignation grew as he saw the danger to which all the lower river country was exposed increasing hourly. And now it was no longer trees torn from the slopes of the giant Andes, but great round enormous boulders, hidden from view, on the sandy bottom, that the stream rolled furiously along down stream.
It was not so much the danger of flood that worried Robledo as the probable fate of the unfinished wall of the dam. Each morning, with the methodical care of a doctor testing his patient, he examined the great dike thrown from bank to bank, the magnificent dam which, so well planned and constructed, had been left unfinished by its builders, first because of their absorbing love affairs, then because of their mortal rivalry.
The wider arm of the dam had been completed to within a few feet of the smaller one, and over these two walls the rising waters poured their volume, marking the place of the submerged obstructions with whirlpools and hissing foam.
Like all men who lead a life of danger, Robledo began to be superstitious, and as he watched the peril that was assuming gigantic proportions, he found himself addressing vague, mysterious divinities, imploring them to wreak a miracle.
“If only we can get through this winter without seeing this wall crash,” he thought. “What luck ...!”
But one morning, quite as though it were one of these sand walls that children spend hours building, and then break down at one capricious blow, the flooding waters snapped off one end of the unfinished arm, and then broke it up as though it were the least cohesive and resistant of substances; and finally, those two submerged walls, in the building of which hundreds of men and thousands of tons of heavy, hard materials had been employed, those walls that had seemed as immovable as the mountains, rolled outward, then down stream, crumbling as they went, to be tossed in fragments on the banks and on the shores of the reed-grown islands.