Unfortunately there appears to be no way to confirm any of this, because Professor Fernandez was one of the many casualties of the recent great Chilean earthquake. The few Indian porters in his party who
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Some Notes Concerning a Green Box
survived the quake were too shaken to do more than report the death of the professor and of their fellows. These men were found in the mountains the night after the quake, shivering and frightened. They were given food and clothing by the government rescue team and permitted to return to their families, except for one oldster who adamantly maintained in spite of the most determined expostulations that the professor was responsible for the quake. According to this patriarch, the professor had been performing some incomprehensible ritual with burning herbs and an odd little idol when the tremors had begun. At this point the old man’s testimony lapses into insane drivel, as when he claims that the mountain across the valley from them got upon gigantic stone feet and stepped on the professor, killing most of the party with him. The poor man was placed hi the pubUc sanitarium for the poor at Rancagua, but apparently escaped last year from that well-known institution.
The other “items of interest” which the good Senor Malpelo forwarded to me was much shorter, but of no ,Iess import. It was a bit from a small Valparaiso newspaper stating that one Juan Maria y Gomez, given occupation, shipwright, was missing and presumed lost at sea during the night of a storm on June 6, 1967. A trawling fishing boat came upon the shattered wreckage of Senor Gomez’s boat the next day. It is mentioned that the ship must have passed through an exceptionally violent part of the storm, because what pieces of the ship’s fittings were found were battered beyond all recognition, even to the shaft of one of the ship’s screws, which was twisted quite completely out of shape.