At Length

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I.

THE DREAM OF THE VAULTS OF GOLD
August 1894

It was as if he had somehow awakened into a dream. 

From deep and empty sleep he was suddenly and fully present, his senses alert and vibrant. 

John Koyle Jr. found himself rising into the air, a sensation altogether foreign but also warm and ecstatic, and wondered momentarily if he had died and was traveling heavenward. His body’s buoyancy made his movements slow and peaceful. His arms drifted up and out from his body and his feet floated apart, forming a pose that faintly rang a schoolbook memory of Leonardo’s Vitruvian. He was rising as if the gravity-bound terrestrial state of his whole life had been an aberration and the higher plane toward which he was now rising was his true home. He perceived in that moment that at birth he had simply descended for a fleeting mortal plunge, and now he was floating through air like thin, thin water, toward a celestial surface. 

His mind struggled to make sense of the sights his eyes took in, for he’d never had occasion to be any distance above anything. He’d hiked to certain heights, such that he could look out over the things that sat at the bottom of whatever hillside he had scaled or cliff he had summited. But he had never seen any significant interval of space open up between his feet and the ground. He’d never witnessed the continuous diminution and consolidation of the tops of things as they fell away below. It had never occurred to him that from the heavens, the tree in his yard was just a green circle encroaching on the plain gray rectangle of his roof. From the valley below, the pines lining the ridges looked like arrowheads, but from the air above even the tallest trees in the forest melded into an undifferentiated moss clinging to the mountainside. 

As he marveled at the view from this unfathomable station, he became aware that his upward drift had slowed, then stopped. He looked around him. It was the time of blue-gray light, the sun just under one horizon or the other. He couldn’t tell which. He saw the jagged peaks that formed the border of the Wasatch Range stretching into the distance to the north and south, their western slopes rolling into the broad valley of Utah County. He found, as he glanced down between his feet, that he was suspended directly above one of the hills just south of Spanish Fork Canyon. Far to the north he saw the salt-bleached southern crust of the Great Salt Lake, and, a little closer, the jagged cusp of Timpanogos Peak. From there the spine of lesser peaks led south toward him, eventually sloping down to the very escarpment on the north side of the canyon where, as a young boy, he had witnessed his father perish in a rockslide while quarrying the cornerstone of his childhood home. The ridge rose again on the nearer side of the canyon just under him and continued to the south, curling around the hamlets of Salem and Payson then rising magnificently to the rocky summit of Mt. Nebo. Directly to the west he saw the scattered farms of Leland, including his own humble patches of hay, alfalfa, and sugarbeets. He saw where the rail lines ran through the farmland and, further on, the shallow glassy shimmer of Utah Lake. He could just make out from this altitude the Jordan River snaking languorously as it flowed, like a backwards umbilical, carrying freshwater north from Utah Lake and emptying it into the briney banks of the Great Salt Lake. Turning in this slow circle above the mountains and valley, Koyle saw laid out below him and around him nearly every inch of the Earth that he had ever trod, shrunken to fit within his field of vision as if it were a map that he could roll up and hold in his hand. 

Gradually he sensed that his body was rotating on another axis at his hips, his head falling slowly forward as his feet came up behind him. His insides clenched and lurched as the horizons gyrated around him, and the warmth and wonder that had swelled within him during his ascent suddenly chilled into panic. His breath escaped him in a yelp, and he struggled to get it back. Soon his feet pointed directly skyward, and he had to crane his head back and jut out his chin in order to look straight on at the earth below. 

No sooner had his frantic gasps for air begun to reorder themselves into respiration than the force that had pulled him heavenward and suspended him there suddenly released its grip, and he plummeted headlong toward the ground. The rush of air against his face quickly blinded him, and he clenched his eyes shut and closed his chin against his chest. For several seconds his arms and legs flailed reflexively to find some toehold or grapple, but as he approached maximum acceleration his limbs aligned with his body and his clumsy axial tumble became a wobbly spiral, then a focused spin.  

As the locomotion of his descent became more ordered and intense, within himself Koyle’s panic quickly turned to dread, then the dread to resignation, and the resignation, in turn, to a kind of defiant resolution. By the time he neared the surface of that hill, by the time the faint shadow cast by his falling body rushed across the hillside to race him to his point of impact, he was fully committed to hitting the ground with as much force as possible. And at the very moment his skull and his shadow met, as the crown of his head pointing downward touched the tips of the blades of grass reaching up, his soul burst with longing for the utter annihilation of every part of his self. 

The surface, however, gave way as if it were a mirage. He passed through it with no more resistance than the air above. He fell and fell further, twisting, catching as he did glimpses of dirt and rock flying past, as if his fall from high in the sky had sent him precisely headlong into a narrow mineshaft. But he sensed that no hole had been there before, that he himself, at this very moment, was boring through the rock itself–or rather that the earth was opening up before him and closing up behind him, like a stone through a long stocking or a mouse through the gullet of a snake, but at a bullet’s speed. And he wondered again if he had died, but perhaps been rerouted to the Lower Realms. 

As he continued, he noticed a kind of rhythm as he passed alternately through walls of slate rock or red-flecked crusts or black stone and soil, and he saw that his path through these strata followed a cream-colored vein of mineral or lime. And after some time he realized that, at any given moment, he somehow knew where the vein would lead, and anticipated when it would jog this way or that, or widen or thin. This circuitous path through this mountain was one that, somehow, he knew. It was no surprise, then, when the cream-colored vein deposited him suddenly into an open cavern. 

Koyle saw that he was inside a mining tunnel, like the ones he’d wandered into a few times out of curiosity on his delivery trips to Eureka. He saw in the dim light around him several men working, swinging pickaxes, loading buckets, dumping them into ore cars. There was a lone light ahead of him, and he was walking toward it. 

It wasn’t a lamp, or a torch. It was a man, dressed in white robes so bright that they seemed to be the main illumination within the cavern. His long silver hair and beard also seemed to glow. He spoke, motioning with his upturned hand around the cavern. 

“Now behold, John Hyrum Koyle, Jr.,” he said, “your mine.” 

The figure’s voice reverberated throughout the cavern, suggesting that the tunnel stretched for some distance. The echo of each syllable tumbled over the top of the next, so that Koyle had to strain to discern the words. The sounds compounded and refracted and multiplied off the tunnel walls, like light through a kaleidoscope. 

Koyle tentatively responded. “My mine?” 

“Your mine, and you must open it up.”

Is that what he had said, thought Koyle, your mine? Or did he say your mind? Open up my mind? It seemed in this dream state that both possible meanings were somehow there at once, superimposed, and both distinctly true. 

The figure continued, “Open it up. For they,” gesturing to the men laboring in the shadows, “will follow.” 

But Koyle also heard and understood, in the echo off the walls: Or they — will fall. 

Koyle went to respond, and noticed that his own thoughts and words came out in the same way. He said, “I don’t know how to make a mine.” And he also said, at the same time, with the same voice, I don’t know how to make’em mind. He thought the two things, and said them both, while only speaking once. Koyle also began to notice that when either he or the robed figure spoke, the percussion of the pickaxes seemed to land in time with the consonants, the scrapes of spades sounded sibilants and fricatives, and the reverberant ring of each blow became a vowel. 

The figure continued,  

This double-utterance sent a jolt of panic to Koyle’s heart.

And then Koyle and the robed figure were suddenly moving together, descending further through the earth without resistance, and Koyle saw that the cream-colored vein was passing between them through the earth as they descended. They soon alighted on a shelf of solid rock, extending in all directions into the darkness beyond the reach of the figure’s glow. The cream-colored vein still stretched between them, extending up into the darkness from where they had been, and abutting with the stone shelf on which they stood. All the other stone and rock around them, apart from this vein and the shelf, had vanished. Still, from the darkness, he could hear the sounds of metal picks against hard stone, and the sounds of ore cars traveling down rails. 

The figure gestured to the cream-colored vein, and said: 

He continued,

Suddenly Koyle and the figure lurched downward, seemingly just a few feet, and the stone shelf was now looming just above their heads. The cream-colored vein was gone, but all around them the space under the stone shelf was filled with flecks of leaf gold suspended in the air as if attached to invisible veins and chunks of quartz. This was, in fact, the case, as the figure explained. 

They lurched downward again, for what seemed like a hundred feet, or two hundred, and when they stopped Koyle had to cover his eyes with his arm. After the dim light of the upper levels of the mine, the illumination of this deepest cavern seemed brighter than the noon-day sun. The figure, his glowing robe even brighter now, emitted rays that ignited a million glistening beams from innumerable mounds of gold, filling an enormous hall. Shining pillars rose from the floor to support vaulted ceilings, and the highest mounds of treasure reached nearly to the top. The figure took him through this room, and others, nine in all. One contained mounds of rich leaf-flecked quartz ore, ready for milling. Another contained mounds of the raw, extracted gold, sorted and sifted into powders, granules, and nuggets; the next housed stacks upon stacks of ingots. There was a bursary, with vases full of minted coins, a goldsmithery stocked with rings and bangles and armlets, and an armory full of lavish ornamental weaponry and armor. One room appeared to be a museum of some sort, with gold relics and artifacts apparently curated and assembled for display. There was what appeared to be a library, with piles of metal plates bearing inscriptions. And finally, a depot, which appeared to have been designed to receive incoming shipments and to load up outgoing wagons. Extending from the depot was a long sloping tunnel, stretching toward the hillside surface to the southwest. This whole mountain, Koyle realized, had once been the treasure trove of a great nation, and wagons entered and exited through that tunnel into these great vaults. He saw also that before the tunnel reached the surface it stopped abruptly. At some point a massive collapse on the hillside had concealed the entrance and hidden this mountain of treasures from the world. 

Koyle paused to look all around himself. With a flick of his open hand the figure had made the mountain translucent so that the whole of its interior could be seen in gossamer layers: the vaults full of riches, the depot with its hidden tunnel, the glittering gold-flecked quartz some distance above them, the solid stone shelf above that, and the cream-colored seam that traced the circuitous path from the shelf to a far point near the surface high on the hillside–where he had first entered headlong at such impossible speed. That point, Koyle understood, was where he was to begin digging in order to bore his way down, down, to these sprawling stores of riches, both geological and archeological, that he saw arrayed before him within the mountain. 

The figure explained: 

He continued:

Koyle strained to understand this message. How could both things he heard be different, and also true? He felt as if he had to choose to listen only and directly to the figure’s voice, and to disregard the ominous echo, because it was simply too overwhelming to make sense of both. It left him in a stupor of thought. He decided: he had to mask the reverberance, in his ears, in his mind, and demand clarity of utterance from the figure, even as his own voice continued to emerge in absurd multiplicities amidst the continuing din of the pickaxes. 

Koyle became flustered as these competing thoughts both commandeered his voice. He tried to shake off the fog in his mind. He repeated the last word, trying to make it come out clear and unambiguously–enrichened, enwretchened, unrichened–but repetition seemed to distort the word even more. He screwed up his eyes in frustration, but then opened them again. 

The sounds of picks and shovels ceased. The echo of the space suddenly attenuated, as if they were now in a stocked hay loft instead of a stone-lined cave. And with an aural clarity and rhetorical firmness that had not yet been present in this dream, the figure answered Koyle’s question:

“YES.” 

Koyle smiled tentatively, the figure more broadly, and with that the tour of the mine proceeded in a dizzying flash. The figure transported Koyle through the space occupied by the mountain, showing him in exacting detail the mine Koyle was to dig into it. There were shafts, tunnels, winzes and winches, stopes, adits, and drifts. Dozens, hundreds of men, digging, hauling, bailing, looking for the cream-colored seam that would lead them to the capstone, which they would break through to get to the rich gold-flecked quartz ore underneath, which would lead them to the vaults of Nephite gold. It had to be Nephites, Koyle thought, though the figure had not said so specifically. The apex of civilization and the nadir of apocalypse in the Book of Mormon, with all its century-long cycles of prosperity and apostasy, all hidden right here, in undeniable physical form, in this humble hill above Spanish Fork. 

The tour concluded, they returned to the treasure vaults and the figure posed a question. “Brother Koyle, what do you think about all I have shown you of the inner workings of your mine?” 

Koyle replied: “It’s glorious. Truly glorious. But I know nothing about mining. I have hardly set foot in a mine, except to deliver supplies to men inside on occasion.” 

“The greatest blessings will be yours,” the figure replied, “if you’re willing to pay the price.” 

Koyle replied from the Bible: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” 

The figure pondered this for a moment. “That is a good question, Brother Koyle. You are a man well-versed in scripture, and one given to visions. I have brought you inside this place, and shown you what may be found here. What purpose would you suppose God might have for a hidden cache of treasure?” 

Koyle considered the grand designs of the Almighty in the last days, the persecution of the Mormon saints driven from Ohio and Missouri and Illinois, the plundered ruins of Nauvoo the Beautiful, the lowly dugout in which he was born, his first miserable memories from his family’s failed mission settlements. And he thought about the mines penetrating these mountain ranges in all directions, so suddenly in recent years, making so many men so very rich. And he thought also about the magnificent temple that the saints had built in Salt Lake City, four decades in the making, which had been dedicated just the year before, and the millennial destiny that its grand spires claimed against the perils of the last days, which were doubtless nigh. He even considered, though he dared not ask, whether the figure showing him these lost vaults of Nephite gold was Moroni himself, the last Nephite, who came back as the angelic messenger to Joseph Smith, and who stood in gold-clad statue on the spire of the new Salt Lake Temple, sounding the herald trumpet to portend the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and usher in the millennium! It was becoming clear in Koyle’s mind that this mine was part of a much bigger plan for God’s people. 

“Perhaps,” Koyle ventured, his mind swimming, “this treasure has been laid up in store, so that it might come forth just in time to give relief to the saints of this valley. To sustain them in the days of tribulation before the Second Coming. Perhaps this treasure will be used to build the City of God, for His glory?” His heart swelled at the thought. 

“That,” the figure declared, “is a worthy answer, one which, in my mind, places the pursuit and acquisition of these riches beyond all reproach. Do you believe in consecration, Brother Koyle?” 

“Of course I do,” Koyle replied. 

“Do you believe that everything a man possesses should be consecrated to God’s purposes?” 

“Yes I absolutely do.” 

“Even his gold?” 

“Especially his gold.” 

The figure then looked Koyle in the eye and said, “Brother Koyle, do you believe that even a man’s lust for gold can be consecrated for the work of the Lord?” 

This curious question put upon Koyle the stupor that he had struggled to shake off before. He furrowed his brow, closed his eyes, and thought. Then he opened his eyes, and replied, firmly: “YES.” 

“Then, Brother Koyle,” the figure announced, opening his hands upward and outward to the glittering array suspended all around and above, in a grand gesture of bequest, “Behold…”

II.

ELDER TALMAGE RECALLS THE PETROGRAPHIC EXCURSION
ACROSS THE URAL MOUNTAINS WITH THE SEVENTH CONGRESS
OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY,
ON HIS WAY TO INSPECT THE KOYLE DREAM MINE
St. Petersburg, Russia, 1897 and
Spanish Fork, Utah, 1913

John Koyle Jr. wasted no time undertaking the task shown him in the dream. On September 3, 1894, he convinced a skeptical cousin to hike with him up the hillside he’d seen in his dream. After ascending for some time they found a spot that seemed to be illuminated a bit brighter than the areas around it, even though it was a clear day and the mid-day sun was directly overhead. They began digging there. Within two feet of the surface, under that bright spot that had drawn them up the mountainside, they hit a cream-colored seam. Within days, Koyle had assembled a crew to dig the initial shaft, and within months he was telling people the mine was going to strike big any day now. Koyle’s venture became known as the “Dream Mine.” 

The momentum from that dream, and the initial discovery of that cream-colored seam, drove Koyle and his colleagues to continue digging for decades. In 1909, they incorporated their efforts as the Koyle Mining Company, shares of which could initially be purchased for $1. Koyle convinced his believers–that is, his shareholders–that if they purchased 100 shares today, not only would they be able to provide for their family with the dividends when the mine finally came in, they would secure membership in a community of saints that would build and inhabit a majestic Millennial city, a fortress in which the righteous could ride out the cleansing cataclysms and destruction attendant to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Eventually, thousands of shareholders joined Koyle’s cause. 

Some were so convinced of Koyle’s vision of riches, and so terrified of his apocalyptic warnings, that they sold off herds, mortgaged farms, even bought Koyle Mining Company shares instead of seed for the next season, so sure were they that the Last Days of Earth would preempt the last frost of winter. When Spring returned but Jesus didn’t, these disenfranchised doomsdayers sheepishly went to their bishops (the lay leaders of their local Mormon congregations) to seek material assistance. Eventually, reports of Koyle’s scheme reached Church headquarters. 

It was thus on assignment that Elder James E. Talmage boarded the southbound train on the Rio Grande line out of Salt Lake City on a summer morning in 1913. He was to investigate reports that the local lay leader of the Leland Ward, Bishop John H. Koyle, Jr., was entangling the church in a suspicious and possibly fraudulent mining scheme. Elder Talmage had written to Bishop Koyle ahead of time to inquire about the nature of the mine and Koyle had responded, explaining that he had been following a certain cream-colored rocky vein or “leader” through the mountain. So far, Koyle said, he had pursued it to a depth of 1100 feet. Koyle had also described numerous other features which had “been made known” to him, and which he anticipated encountering through further excavations. Bishop Koyle had declined to elucidate exactly how these features had “been made known” to him, or by whom. 

But Elder Talmage had already heard the rumors. What started as a few eccentrics two decades ago had grown into a movement, and an alarming number of members of the Church were apparently being solicited to invest in Koyle’s mine venture solely on the merits of his marvelous dream. Men were sharing tales about the mine at the barbershop in the Deseret Gymnasium up in Salt Lake City, fifty miles from the mine, and some were taking the train down to Spanish Fork to meet with Koyle and join his movement. Well-meaning but credulous souls claimed to have been “converted” by the Spirit after hearing Koyle’s story–converted! to a mine! 

One eager brother had been caught trying to sell shares in Koyle’s mine to other worshippers inside the sacred walls of Salt Lake Temple, and had been expelled and barred from reentry. He had also knocked on one couple’s door, like a missionary distributing tracts, and told them that they were lucky to have a chance to buy into the mine at this late date, and to reap the same benefits as the people who’d believed in Koyle for 18 years. When the couple expressed wariness, the Dream Mine salesman had told them to pray on the issue. Luckily, this prudent couple declined to invest after doing just as he’d said. Upon praying on the question, the husband later reported to Talmage, “My wife dreamed the following night that they mined away the whole mountain without finding anything.” The image of Koyle’s mine eating up the whole hill both humored and haunted Talmage: how long would they keep digging without finding anything? The scriptures do say that faith can move mountains, but could folly make one vanish entirely? 

Alas, many others were somehow falling under Koyle’s spell. Mine advocates described Koyle as “elect,” impervious to deception, and cited the ecclesiastical strength of the Leland ward that he oversaw as bishop as evidence that his mining operation was sound. Believers boasted that all the men working Koyle’s mine were upstanding churchgoers who eschewed the bottle, foreswore swearing, rejected adultery and fornication, and prayed over every meal. Drawn in by this air of an enterprise beyond reproach, potential investors were persuaded that proceeds from the mine would be consecrated for the benefit of the Church during troubling times to come, and that when the mine came in and their investment paid off, they would have the means to donate generously to the Church for the building up of the Kingdom, and that they would be free to retire from their regular labors and devote themselves full time to ministry and temple worship. 

The Brethren at the head of the Church needed Elder Talmage to find out if Koyle was running a business scam, starting a religious schism, or simply doggedly pursuing some kind of delusion. Perhaps it was just a mine like any other of the countless mines in the region, blessed or cursed by chance or destiny, save that it was run by an eccentric but harmless prospector who had a vivid nocturnal imagination–and who just happened to be a lay bishop of a rural ward. Did they need to just disclaim the mine? Or condemn it? 

Talmage, a professional geologist by trade prior to his recruitment into the Church’s all-lay leadership, was uniquely qualified to undertake this investigation. Upon returning from his collegiate studies in the East, Talmage had been enlisted to put the Church’s nascent educational institutions on solid academic footing and serve as the intellectual face of the Church in public fora. He’d even taken microscope specimen slides of brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake and live horned toads from the west desert to share with colleagues at scientific conferences. And in 1897 he had traveled to Russia as a distinguished delegate to the International Geological Congress and had been one of a handful of the world’s foremost mineral scientists who took part in a pre-conference railway excursion to the many mining operations in the Ural Mountains. 

In recent years Talmage had often had occasion to reminisce about the Ural excursion. As the mining industry accelerated in Utah, Talmage was called on with increasing frequency as a geological consultant. He traveled to various prospecting sites to identify any geological features and mineralization patterns that indicated the likely presence of metal ore. In 1911, he’d been called into the Church’s ministry full-time as a member of its Quorum of Twelve Apostles. Now here he was, with the ecclesiastical title “Elder” in front of his name, taking the train to a rural outpost to conduct essentially the same business he would have been doing for a fee a few years before: telling a miner whether or not it was a good idea to dig a certain hole. 

Boarding the train, it was unclear to Elder Talmage whether his visit was going to be primarily scientific, commercial, or ecclesiastical in nature. He suspected it was going to test his patience and charity on all three fronts. 

As Talmage awaited the train’s departure, the physical toll of his ministry–he worked notoriously long hours–lured him into intermittent dozing. And, as often happens in that type of unsettled, episodic sleep, time stretched more languorously in his dreams than in the world outside. The train trip from Salt Lake City to Spanish Fork would only take a waking hour or two. But inside Talmage’s mind, time jumped backwards, unfolded, and decompressed into vivid recollections of a weeks-long journey he had taken years before. 

He found himself thousands of miles away from Utah, on the banks of the Moskva river in Russia, with the other delegates to the 1897 Geological Congress, admiring the fossil-rich carboniferous beds near Miatchkovo. As the passenger car in Salt Lake City lurched into motion and pulled away from the platform heading southeast toward Spanish Fork, Talmage’s dream placed him in a different train, this one leaving Moscow station heading southeast toward the horseshoe curve where the Volga River juts out to meet Samara. When Talmage’s train emerged from the gridded streets of Salt Lake proper and into the open valley, what he saw out the window was the eastern edge of Ufa, which fell away behind him as the tracks ascended the foothills of the Ural Mountains. And when his car jostled through the pass at the south end of Salt Lake Valley, he found himself, and the rest of the world’s preeminent geologists, tagging along in the rickety ore wagons that shuddered under the weight of the loads they carried from the iron mines of Bakal to the foundries at Sim. The train then carried Talmage along the northeast edge of Utah Lake, but in his mind he was admiring the crystalline schists at Zlatoust and touring the iron, copper, malachite, manganese, and platinum mines of the Nizhny Tagal region. During the stretch between the Provo and Springville stations, Talmage’s dream recapped the easternmost point of his 1897 rail journey, winding through the Ilmen range, deep in the Urals, to the mining town of Miass, where, a half-century before, a worker’s pick had struck a massive gold nugget, the largest ever found in Russia. And as the 1913 Utah-Rio Grande train made its final approach into Spanish Fork, Talmage’s 1897 dream train rocketed north to Yekaterinburg and circled back westward to St. Petersburg, where the delegates to the Geological Congress were given a glimpse of that same massive 37 kilogram nugget from the Miass mines, known as the “The Great Triangle,” which had been carefully transported out of the Urals and placed on display at the Russian National Mining Museum.  

Then the dream slowed, and paused. Elder Talmage peered through the display glass encasing the enormous golden stone. He had never seen anything so magnificent, gleaming in its rough, earthly, God-given chemical state rather than transformed into some crass human treasure. Some gaudy bauble. This gold nugget, drawn straight from the womb of earth and otherwise unadulterated by human process, spoke directly to that part of Talmage’s soul where spiritual yearning and scientific curiosity were indistinguishable, where the mortal reckoning of time collapsed under the weight of unfathomable geological epochs and disappeared into the orbits of Kolob. Was this perhaps how God saw gold? Was this why He created it in the first place, for its inherent beauty rather than its scarcity–since, knowing as He does where every treasure is hidden and how it is made, nothing for Him is scarce? 

The sheer size of the Great Triangle seemed to prolong this flash of wonder for Talmage, as perhaps it had done in that moment just before some miserable Russian miner–whose lucky pick had caught the edge of the thing–shook off the wonder and remembered his own sorry state. Before he inevitably succumbed to the sin of evaluation, of calculating currency. Before he was obliged by harsh circumstance to assess the beautiful stone’s obsequious transactional potential. Before the virtue of beauty became the vice of idolatry. 

Amidst this geological and theological reverie as Talmage gazed at the giant gold nugget, he misjudged his distance from the museum glass and his forehead struck against it. He jerked back from it with a gasp. 

But of course it wasn’t the museum glass in St. Petersburg in 1897 at all, and there was no 37 kilogram golden nugget behind it. Talmage’s nodding head had thumped the window of the 1913 train looking out to the platform of the Rio Grande station at Spanish Fork, and beyond that, to the hill where Bishop Koyle was digging his hole. 

At the train station in Spanish Fork Elder Talmage rented a horse and buggy and rode south toward the spot where the southeast tip of Spanish Fork and the northeast tip of Salem meet the base of the hill housing Koyle’s mine. He parked the buggy there and proceeded up to the mine on horseback. He was pleased to be greeted partway up the hill by his old student, Robert Bradford, who had gone off to Columbia University to get his Ph.D. and then had come back to the Department of Mining and Metallurgy at the University of Utah. Talmage was a geologist and mining expert himself, of course, but since he was today visiting Koyle’s mine in his capacity as a Church elder, he had asked Brother Bradford to meet him here and to serve as the designated scientific delegate to this unusual gathering. 

“Brother Bradford!” he hailed his friend. “You look well! How much further up have I got to go?” 

Bradford waved a big flat-brimmed hat in greeting, then pulled his horse alongside Talmage’s close enough to clap him on the back. “Welcome to the Dream Mine, Elder Talmage!” he called. Then, more quietly, “I offered to come down and guide you up so I could prepare you for what you’re going to find up there.” 

“Oh dear,” Talmage moaned. “What have we got?” 

Bradford let out a long sigh through a pained smirk. “Well, Elder, I’ll leave it up to you to conduct a theological assessment, but as far as mines go, from a geological standpoint this has to be the strangest one I’ve ever seen. So very much work and expense, and not an ounce of ore to show for it.” 

“Is this enterprise fraudulent, do you think, or simply foolish?” Talmage asked. 

Bradford slowed up his horse and lowered his voice even further. “James,” he said, “whether John Koyle is a charlatan or a madman, I’m not sure I can tell. And whether the men who have poured their money and time into this mine are victims of any criminality besides their own dim wits, I don’t know that I can judge that either. Usually frauds and delusions and outlandish hobbies burn themselves out, and either the huckster moves on to the next town or the victims move on to their next diversion.” 

“But the longer Bishop Koyle keeps digging and finding nothing, the more people seem to think he’s just about to hit it big?” 

“It is the dangdest thing, James. You’ll see. These men up here hang on his every word.” 

“Are they the kind of men who would have better things to do if they weren’t here at the mine with Bishop Koyle, or is this endless tunnel keeping them out of mischief, at least?” 

“Oh, I’m sure some are listless youth who’d probably be getting into trouble at some other mine if they weren’t working at this one. But some of them, in my opinion, really should be expending their time and energy in more worthy pursuits. There’s a man up here,” Bradford said, pointing up the hill for emphasis, “who seems the furthest thing from a dolt. Breeds and works horses, had the finest steeds around. Took them to the county and state fair every year, brought home ribbons every time. You probably passed his stables on the way here. Well, those stables are empty now. Bishop Koyle told him to pray for a sign about investing in the mine, and this brother said an angel appeared to him in his dream and told him to sell all his horses and give all the money to Koyle. He didn’t want to do what the angel told him to in the dream, so he went and asked God for a sign.” 

“Meaning?” 

“He got a fleece, and he set it out on the ground at night…” 

“…and the next morning,” Talmage finished, shaking his head, “the ground was wet with dew but the fleece was dry. Like Gideon got in the Old Testament.”  

“Just so, he says. Sold all his horses and gave all the money to Koyle, and he’s up here now, happily helping to dig the silliest tunnel you’ll ever see.” 

“How far in are they?” Talmage asked. 

“Somewhere north of a thousand feet, all told? But not in any sort of sensible configuration, from what I gather. They just dig for a while, then Koyle tells them to turn this way or that, and after digging a ways that way, he has them turn again. It’s like an ant hill.” 

“Is it safe, at least as safe as a mine can be?” Talmage inquired warily. “I suppose at the very least, a crooked shaft would have the virtue of slowing down your trip to the bottom if you slipped?” 

Bradford met the dark joke soberly. “They lost a man last year, James. A couple of fellas were horsing around, one of them lost his hold on a long ladder, fell 75 feet down a shaft and broke his neck.” 

At this news the feeling of bemused dread, which had up to that point been Talmage’s attitude toward this whole enterprise, hardened into a simmering anger. For the last couple of switchbacks up to the mine camp, he silently seethed off some fury so that by the time he had to greet these misguided men and their inexplicable leader, he’d have regained the civil composure befitting an apostle on assignment. When the two men arrived at the camp, Talmage was able to offer up a gracious smile. 

“Elder, it is an honor and a privilege to have you here!” John Koyle beamed and waved when he saw Talmage and Bradford approach. He eagerly offered a hand as Talmage dismounted and beckoned to someone to take care of the horses. A man got the horses and took them over by a rough cabin that appeared to serve as barracks. 

“Bishop Koyle,” Talmage announced with the grace of a diplomat, “the pleasure is mine.” He regarded Koyle and his crew. A few men were dusty, some were wet from bailing, most were presumably still at their posts inside the hill, but Koyle himself was shined like a new nickel. His hair was slicked back, his ribbon tie splayed across his white shirt almost to his suspenders, and in similar fashion his mustache fanned proudly between the deep creases at the ambitus of his wide grin. 

“Have you already ate lunch?” Koyle asked. “We’ve just finished ours, but we can provide something for you after your long journey here.” 

“Thank you very kindly, Bishop, but I brought something to eat on the way already, and I am anxious to see the workings you have developed here,” Talmage continued. He jutted his chin toward the mouth of the adit, just up and over from the camp. “Shall we start there?” 

“Certainly,” Koyle said, gesturing for Talmage and Bradford to follow him over to the adit, from which a tall bespectacled man had just emerged. “I’m going to leave you in the capable hands of our superintendent, Brother Lars Olsen. He can show you the workings, and then afterwards we can reassemble at the camp to discuss our operations and I will answer your questions as best I can.” 

Talmage nodded in assent and reached a hand to Olsen, who welcomed him and drew him out of the rising July sun into the cool shade of the adit. From a cabinet just inside the entrance Olsen retrieved two helmets affixed with Baldwin carbide pit lamps, identical to the one he already wore. He began to assist them with the lamps, but Talmage and Bradford had both spent enough time underground to know how to adjust the valve on the top of the canister and thumb the striker at the edge of the reflector in order to engage the acetylene flame. With their headlamps lit they could follow the ore cart track into the mountain. 

“We put in this track a couple of years ago,” Olsen explained as they walked. “Cuts down how far we have to hoist the buckets on this first windlass station. Once the bucket makes it up here we have a man ready to dump it into the cart. After several bucketloads, the cart fills up and we send it out.” 

“How often do you conduct assays of the materials?” Talmage asked. 

“Whenever Bishop tells us to,” Olsen answered, a bit guardedly. 

Talmage tempered the urge to interrogate further on this point. They now approached the place where the adit tunnel intersected with the original shaft. The light from their lamps landed on the straw-colored rope of the windlass, which cut a clean vertical line splitting the black circle of the opening into hemispheres. Kneeling at the opening and craning his head upward, Talmage could see the rope ascending through the shaft to the bright circle of daylight at the top, where the rope wound around the crankshaft of the windlass. Turning to look down, Talmage saw the rope and shaft and ladder descend into darkness beyond the reach of his Baldwin. 

“Should we go on down?” Talmage asked. 

“After you, Elder,” Olsen said, gesturing with an upturned hand. The three of them carefully stepped down the ladder to the bottom of that first stretch of the shaft, following the path of the windlass rope. Once at the bottom they saw a light approaching from a side drift. A miner with a full bucket inched past them through the narrow opening, slung the handle of the bucket onto the heavy hook at the end of the windlass rope, and hollered up the shaft to the man running the gas hoist at the top of the windlass. 

“Pete,” Olsen said to the man, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to follow that bucket up. There’s no one at the cart right now to receive it while I show these gentlemen around, so you’ll have to dump it yourself.” The miner nodded and called up an instruction to the man at the hoist. They heard the distant spurt and rumble as the hoist engine started up. The miner deftly double-runged his way up the ladder and the bucket on the rope soon followed. 

“Sorry for interrupting your work, Brother Olsen,” said Bradford. 

“It’s no trouble,” Olsen assured him. “If we were already in the ore, I’d perhaps be less inclined to slow the pace, but for today Bishop made it very clear that we were to show you the utmost hospitality and let you follow your lamps whither you will throughout our mine.” The last three words had a bright timbre of pride.  

“Thank you, Brother. So tell me,” Talmage asked, nodding up toward the ascending bucket, “this here is the first windlass out of how many in the mine?” 

“Eleven,” Olsen answered. 

Both Talmage and Bradford were so surprised by this number they shot shocked glances at each other, forgetting that the bright beams from their Baldwin lamps would follow the rotation of their gawking heads and send circles of light racing across opposite sides of the tunnel and into each other’s faces. “That… suggests a rather circuitous route to the ore, doesn’t it?” inquired Talmage. 

“That is the path that Bishop Koyle has taken in pursuit of that cream-colored vein he saw in his dream” Olsen explained. “Wherever it goes, it’s supposed to get us there. Some of the windlass runs are shorter than others, of course, with some winzes and drifts between, but yes–eleven windlasses in total.” 

Olsen entered the inclined winze where the man with the bucket had emerged, and Talmage and Bradford followed as he continued his explanation. “We try to keep a man at each windlass transfer station, that’s ten men, plus one or two running the cart in the adit, another manning the gasoline hoist up top, one keeping the ventilation blower going, one running the sump pump to keep the diggers above the water line, and then the two men at the bottom, digging. And we run two shifts, so we usually keep over thirty men busy with our mine.” 

A curving chute brought them to a windlass at the top of another shaft. They descended in this manner, down ladders through shafts and down inclines through winzes and laterally through narrow side drifts, with barely enough room for the workers at the stations to wriggle past them with their buckets. When they got to the bottom of the furthest drift, the three of them and the two diggers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle around the bucket full of rock at the bottom of the winze. If there were a baby in that bucket, Talmage thought, the five of them could lay their hands on it to give it a name and a blessing. 

“Dar, Tom,” Olsen introduced the miners, “this is Elder James E. Talmage from Church Headquarters, and Dr. Robert Bradford, from up to the University of Utah. Both these men are geological scientists come down to inspect our operations.” The men nodded in greeting, the beams from their Baldwins bobbing in the dusty air of the shaft. 

“Brethren,” Elder Talmage addressed them, “tell me how you go about your work.” 

Urged on by a nod from Olsen, Tom spoke first. “Well, there’s always two of us down here at the bottom. We sink the shaft however deep Bishop tells us to, then he sometimes comes down and takes a look to see what rock we’re into, and maybe he’ll say to keep going further down or maybe drift this way or that.” 

“Lotta times,” Dar, the other digger, interjected, “Bishop will say ‘you’re going to hit a black footwall,’ or ‘you’re going to get into some loose lime,’ or ‘cut in this way and you’ll pick up that cream-colored seam,’ cause he’d have dreamt the night before what we was gonna dig in the next day. And it’s always just as Bishop says.” 

At that moment they heard a shout from above and the rope lurched. The man at the windlass station above them was hoisting the bucket. It moved about a foot, then lurched again and stopped. They heard a faint voice far up the shaft from them, and they all instinctively turned their heads up to follow the sound, all five Baldwin beams suddenly converging on the rope stretching up through the tunnel. There was some mechanical squeaking and groaning, and the rope appeared to vibrate along with the mechanical sounds coming from its other end. 

Talmage continued, delicately. “You say that you always dig into exactly whatever rock features Mr. Koyle predicts you’re going to dig into, based on his dreams. But does it not ever give you pause, brethren, that the principal goal of Koyle’s enterprise, and indeed the primary feature of his premonitions, has not ever proven true?” 

The bucket suddenly lurched into motion again, and a ratchet crank could be heard turning at the top of the windlass. But after just another foot or so, it squealed and stopped, and a voice descended down the tunnel to them: “Gosh. DANGIT.” 

“I… I’m not sure what you mean, Elder Talmage,” confessed Tom. But the bucket was now suspended in the air between them right at the level of their heads, so he didn’t know where in space to address his question. The beam from his Baldwin peeked over the bucket, then under, then around, trying to catch Talmage’s face. Talmage likewise tried to find Tom with his beam, and the others tried to follow, and it seemed for a moment like opera house spotlights were circling the bucket waiting for Houdini to escape from it. 

Olsen, the tallest man in the circle of five, peered as best he could at the rest of them over the top of the bucket. “Elder, I believe you are suggesting…” 

Robert Bradford, who had held his tongue valiantly to this point, crouched low underneath the bucket now so that his light shone right up into the diggers’ eyes and blurted out, “What Dr. Talmage is saying is, doesn’t it drive you mad that for years now John Koyle has been telling you that the mine was going to come in this summer, or this month, or Tuesday next, and you still haven’t found an ounce of ore?!” 

Outside the reach of the light from any of the lamps, Talmage gently rested a calming hand on Bradford’s arm. 

“Let me pose the question another way,” Elder Talmage suggested. “What is it that motivates you good brethren to keep working in the mine, as you wait so long now for it to come in?” 

Olsen answered first, from above the bucket. “We know that the Lord works in mysterious ways, and that His time is not our time, and that the mine will come in when the time is right.” 

“And the way I see it,” Dar proposed, his beam still searchlighting around the bucket, “is that since I’m here working for stock in the mine…” 

“No cash pay at all, just stock?” Bradford interrupted, straining to keep the octave of his voice from revealing his exasperation. 

“Well sure, all of us here in the tunnels are working for stock,” explained Tom, hunching down into a crouch to match Baldwin beams under the bucket with Bradford. “We do other jobs here and there to get by, but we are laying up for the future by working in the mine.” 

Dar finally ceased his erratic illumination of the narrow shaft and settled into the same low pose, looking earnestly under the bucket at Talmage and Bradford. “As I was saying,” Dar continued, “I work for stock. Two shares a day. And the more days I work, the more stock I get. So you see, the longer it takes for the mine to come in, the more shares I will have by the time it does, and the better off I will be!” He felt a certain exhilaration as this logic crystallized in his mind, as if he’d beat smug old Janie Creer to the right answer at the blackboard in 8th grade math. 

“But what,” Talmage ventured, “if it never comes in?” 

“Oh, it will come in! OF COURSE it will come in!” Dar scoffed. “I mean, can you imagine all of us digging all of these tunnels in here for all these years, for nothing?” 

The question hung in the air between them, just under the bucket, suspended at the intersection of the Baldwin beams by its own gyroscopic tautology. Lanky Lars Olsen finally stooped low to regard it with them. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, and furrowed his brow. 

After a long moment the windlass screeched into motion again, the bucket finally ascended from its spot between them, and they were all finally able to stand up straight. 

“I propose,” said Lars Olsen brightly, “that we ascend to the camp, and that we address any other questions you might have to Bishop Koyle.”

Back at the camp, the late afternoon sun still bright, Elder Talmage struggled to find the ministerial tone that would convey to the men gathered there the genuine love he had for them as saints in the kingdom, but also communicate, with the gravity befitting necessary correction, that the man they followed was misguided and that the enterprise into which he had drawn them was pure folly. He began their meeting by asking Bishop Koyle to recount for them the story of the mine–not because he needed to hear it again, having read the reports in the papers, but so that he could have more time to ponder a response to all he had seen in his tour of the mine. 

Koyle, of course, needed little prompting to recount his tale in detail, and the energy of his retelling was clearly boueyed by the eagerness of the miners gathered there to hear it yet again. When he concluded, Talmage stood and regarded the men before speaking. 

“Brethren,” he said, containing his mixed emotions, “it is only a few decades since our people made their way over these mountains and into these valleys. Some of the oldest among us still remember the hardships of the journey. They lost so many. And so much. So very much.” The men nodded soberly. “And yet we have built so much. We have brought water from the mountains down into desert farms. We have built homes and towns and cities and courthouses and opera houses and academies. And temples, brethren. Magnificent temples.” 

He cleared his throat and adjusted his timbre. “Brother Bradford, how would you assess the manner by which these men have made their way to the point inside the mountain where those two good brethren were digging today?” 

“Well, Elder Talmage,” Bradford proffered from his seat on a bench, “Let’s say that this is the mountain on which we now sit.” He modeled the mountain in the air by holding his hands one over the other at the mountaintop and then drawing his hands down at angles over opposite slopes. Within the invisible mound he’d drawn in the air he pointed out the salient features.“The original shaft began here, near the top, and it has reached to a depth here, some distance down into the mountain, where we found Brother Tom and Brother Dar digging today.” As he said this his right hand started at the top with a downpointed finger then descended in a long line to the lower spot and hovered there. “I estimate that the cost for excavating vertically to this distance, over the course of the eighteen years since the claim was staked, is about $100,000.” He then brought his left hand up, pointing laterally, and moved it inward to form an “L” shape with his index fingers. “But if you had dug from the side of the mountain rather than from the top, like this, you could have tunneled your way to the exact same spot inside the mountain, in a fraction of the time, and for about one tenth of the cost.” The men received this information silently. “And,” Bradford continued, in a retreating tone that seemed to try to soften its own blow, “if you had dug in from the side at a slight upward incline, the tunnel would drain itself and you wouldn’t have to continually bail out the water as you’ve had to do.” 

Elder Talmage paused for some kind of response from Koyle or his assembly, but the only replies he got were many averted gazes and a handful of simmering glares. 

“Thank you, Brother Bradford.” Talmage pondered, inhaled, then proceeded. 

“Brethren, I must speak plainly about the work in which you are so anxiously engaged here. For it is not just the direction or method of your digging that has been in error, but your very purpose. I must tell you, and I believe Dr. Bradford here will concur, that from the standpoint of geological structure and all the known laws of mineral occurrence, your effort here is absolutely without promise of success. This cream-colored vein that you have been following through such a curious path through the mountain, Bishop Koyle?” 

The Bishop shifted on his bench, trying to camouflage his brewing humiliation with his broad grin. “Elder Talmage,” he said with determined calmness, “the shaft is sunk exactly where it has been shown me in my dream. We have followed the vein as best we could, according to the instructions I have received.” 

“That vein,” Talmage replied in a wilted, pleading tone, “is just a fault slip, one of innumerable such features that appear all over this western face of the Wasatch, wholly incidental to the profound fault by which this noble range has been elevated, and altogether unremarkable in its geological indications! It is not the result of ancient mineralogical infusions of the type that would bring ore deep from the earth up to the surface, but of much more recent breakage and admixture of common surface rock. A man could sink a hole in any mountain on this range and chance upon a similar feature.” 

Talmage then turned his attention from Bishop Koyle to the assembly. “I am so sorry to be so frank, as it goes against all my affection toward you good men, but this entire undertaking seems to me to be lacking in the ordinary elements of common sense. This is my honest assessment as a scientist, and as one who has visited successful mines all over the Wasatch and indeed throughout the world. I feel I would not be doing my duty if I were to fail to set forth plainly what I see as the utter recklessness and uselessness of this work.” 

Talmage shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Of course you may spend your time and treasure in whatever manner you wish; your free agency is your own and will not be interfered with by me. But brethren, I come here today not as a scientist, but as an apostle and servant. I have made this a matter of prayer, and I have asked the Lord to help me be free from all prejudice or bias and to be able to recognize the facts and the truth. And in that capacity, and in that spirit, I will tell you that as I have been here on this hill, and inside it, I have received an impression, not to be disregarded, that the source of the inspiration which you claim is the very opposite of divine.” 

Elder Talmage sat, exhausted. The assembled men brooded in silence for several moments. Finally, Bishop Koyle quietly spoke. 

“Brother Talmage, I thank you for going to such considerable effort to travel here and to give our operation such a thoroughgoing assessment. If you will pardon me, I have some acquaintances arriving on the 6:40 southbound, and I need to meet them at the station. I would offer to accompany you there to see you off, but I fear that you will miss the last northbound train out of Spanish Fork. I suggest you enlist one of these good brethren here to accompany you to the Springville station, where you can catch a later train north. He can return your horse and buggy to the livery in Spanish Fork.” 

Dr. Bradford said he was going to stay the night with relatives, so he bid farewell to Elder Talmage at the bottom of the hill. Dar, the digger, offered to take Talmage to Springville Station and return the buggy. As he saw him off, Dar ventured an olive branch and extended a hand. “Well, Elder Talmage, you sure did give us ‘Dreamers’ an awful lot to think about.” 

Talmage took the offered hand in both of his. “Thank you for your assistance this evening, Brother. You are a good man, and I believe your heart will lead you right.” 

It was after 11pm when the train rolled into Salt Lake, and after midnight when Elder Talmage knelt for a silent and weary prayer and slipped into bed. He fell asleep thinking about the winding path of the mine through the mountain and he wondered just how far Tom and Dar and the men would keep digging, and then he thought about the woman who had dreamt that Koyle dug away the whole hill until it was gone altogether, and that left Elder Talmage nothing at all to dream about that night.

III.

THE DREAM OF THE POWERFUL VIBRATING INFLUENCE
January 10, 1914

In the days and months that followed Elder Talmage’s inspection of the mine, the Church took swift ecclesiastical action against Koyle and his enterprise. The Church-owned Deseret News ran a forceful denouncement of mining schemes purporting divine influence or sacred purpose. Koyle was released from his position as Bishop of the Leland ward, a humiliating public disgrace. He was instructed, in no uncertain terms, to discontinue invoking religion when selling stock in the Dream Mine. And everyone involved in the mine was warned by local Church authorities that continued involvement with the Koyle could be grounds for Church discipline, up to and including excommunication. But Koyle’s vision for the mine remained undiminished. And the dreams kept coming. 

It was a cold January night but Koyle had slept over at the mine cabin rather than return home to his family and farmhouse in Leland. He needed to oversee the initial excavation of the new lower tunnel, which they had started digging just a few days before. Back in July when Elder Talmage had visited, he and his geologist friend from the University had observed that the destination point inside the mountain could be more easily reached by cutting in from the side at a slight incline to allow for easier removal of dirt and drainage of water. Upon hearing this criticism Koyle remembered that just such a tunnel had been part of his original 1894 dream but had never been realized. Talmage’s criticism, at any rate, and Koyle’s consequent removal as bishop, had had the opposite of their intended effect. Without the heavy ministerial duties of shepherding a congregation, and without the obligations attendant to holding position in the ecclesiastical heirarchy, Koyle was free to dream and dig as he saw fit. 

Koyle determined the optimal spot for the new lower tunnel would be on the north side of the hill, over the saddle and down the slope. The specific placement of the mouth of the new lower tunnel could be calculated easily enough, despite the circuitous interior path of the mine thus far. The depths of the winzes and windlasses together would identify the lowest point of the shaft, and the entry of the tunnel could be calculated from the slope and length of the hypotenuse hillside. This is not the tack Koyle took, however. Instead, he told the men to go down into a ravine on the north side of the hill. There, he predicted, they would see what he had been shown in vision: two bare spots in the snow, one below the other. The lower spot would be where they would dig the tunnel in, in a straight shot, for 3000 feet, and from there they could connect up with the bottom of the original shaft and continue excavating to find the capstone, the rich ore, and the treasure vaults he’d been shown. 

Early in the morning of January 10, 1914, at about 5:00am, Koyle lay awake in bed. Lars Olsen, the mine superintendent, was sleeping next to him, but fitfully. Koyle too, did not feel rested, as he felt he had just awakened from a strange and vexing dream. He was trying to reassemble the substance and sequence of it in his mind when he was seized by what he later described as a “powerful vibrating influence” that lasted for several minutes. He thought it was perhaps an earthquake, of the type to which the fault underneath the Wasatch Mountains was occasionally prone. The cabin itself did not seem to have shaken, however. It was just the bed, or perhaps it was just just him. The vibration came again, even stronger, then left, then happened a third time. When it finally ended, Koyle found himself sitting bolt upright in the bed. At the foot of the bed stood two bearded figures, dressed in gray, one tall, one short. The tall one remained silent throughout the visit. The short one spoke. 

“We are the stewards of this mine,” he said. 

He moved his mouth as he spoke, but the sound didn’t seem to come out of it in the normal range of a man’s voice. Instead, Koyle heard a high whistle, almost like wind sneaking into the cabin, which seemed to articulate the S’s and F’s and T’s and P’s. At the same time, with the sound of each syllable the figure voiced, Koyle felt a low buzzing sensation on the surface of his skin as if his whole body was his eardrum. And as the tone and timbre of the man’s voice changed from one syllable to the next, the vibration shifted in the pattern of intensity with which it distributed itself across Koyle’s body. Perhaps, Koyle thought, the three powerful vibrations that preceded the appearance of these two figures was simply the sound of his name being called three times, and only with repetition had his body figured out how to hear it. 

“We have watched over and guarded this hill for centuries, awaiting the arrival of one who would uncover its secrets.” 

The tall figure held up his left hand, empty, but open as if he were examining the pages of a book. He looked at the invisible volume, then brushed it with the fingers of his right hand as if to turn the page. As he did this, the walls of the cabin vanished away and instead Koyle saw his memories unfolding before him all at once and on all sides. Turn the page, and he saw his encounters with death: when the snake fell onto the bed beside him and his mother from the roof of the rough dugout in which he’d just been born, another invisible page, and he saw the wagon wheel that nearly crushed his tiny head in the accident on the way to the Muddy River, and as the tall figure thumbed through the invisible tome Koyle saw his father’s crumbled, ruined body half-buried in the rockslide, he saw the tiny lifeless figures of baby Emeline and baby Hyrum and baby Jesse, his stillborn children, and he saw the fever go in and the life go out of little Amy, his daughter lost to meningitis, and he saw Brother Brockbank swing that first pickaxe up the slope of the hill, and he saw a windlass with an infinite rope and a bucket descend into the bowels of the earth, and the tall figure’s hand trembled above the book and Koyle saw all at once all the tunnels and treasures of the inside of the mine. 

The short figure continued in his hissing, booming, buzzing voice. “Everything you have seen in vision shall come to pass. The mine in all its intricacies. The capstone. The ore. The vaults of gold and sacred treasures long hidden. The tunnel you have just begun has been placed according to our plan, and it will lead you to the riches within.” 

Koyle began to notice that with every “n,” the accompanying vibration caused the skin and muscles around his ribs to tighten. At every “s,” his fingertips buzzed. Every “r” washed him all over with fleeting warmth. 

The tall figure flicked his hand, and Koyle saw all around the bed the mine in full operation, ore cars overloaded with ore and ingots. The short figure announced, “Though your enemies may succeed in closing this mine for a season, it will open up once again.” Another flick, and Koyle saw the inside of the Salt Lake Tabernacle, and he himself stood at the podium, and there behind him were all the men of the mine in the seats reserved for the Church authorities, and outside, denied entry and dispossessed, were Elder James Talmage and all the others complicit in Koyle’s dismissal as bishop. The short figure continued: “There will be a setting-in-order, and those who have opposed you will be made to account, and those who have been loyal will be elevated to positions of honor.” 

He continued, more forcefully. “We will deal with those who deny the mine and its coming-in. The Adversary exercises influence over the minds of many, and they will bring all manner of calumny against you. But in the end, the name of John Koyle and the mine with his name shall have great esteem, reverence, renown, and vindication!” 

The vibrations of this last declaration built on each other towards a kind of paroxysm, and when the figure elongated “minnne” and “rrreverrrenccce” and “vinnndicationnn” it caused Koyle’s chest to seize, his back to arch, his whole body to flush, and a sustained jolt of electricity to shoot to every extremity. This ecstatic convulsion raised him from the bed, then dropped him and left him lifeless and bathed in sweat.  

In this state of near paralysis, his neck and limbs limp and his mouth and eyes agape, Koyle listened as the figures showed him further visions, gave him further instructions, and promised him even greater wonders. They warned him, however, that he could only share a small portion of what he had seen, and the rest must remain secret until an appointed hour. They also told him to write nothing down, only to tell and have retold the small, approved portion of the vision they had shared with him. Finally, the tall figure closed his invisible book. The wall of the cabin disappeared completely, revealing the hillside behind it. They walked through where the wall had been, waved goodbye, and disappeared as the cabin wall remade itself behind them.

Only then did Lars Olsen stir from his sleep and find Koyle there, splayed, sweaty, and near lifeless, but with his eyes wide and wild, gazing at the wall the two figures had walked through. It was some time before Koyle had regained his faculties enough to tell of his new vision. He gave his account to the men gathered for breakfast, but when he got to the grandest and most secret part of the vision, which he had been forbidden to share, he stopped and stood in a daze. The men asked him to continue, to tell them more of the secrets and wonders. 

Koyle only replied, “It’s too big. You couldn’t take it.” 

IV.

WAITING FOR THE MINE TO COME IN 
1914-1949

This dream carried the men through the cold winter, and others like it carried them through the decades that followed. Opposition from the Church continued, compounded by scrutiny from the state. When Koyle had originally incorporated his mining company and issued shares, he’d had to ask nobody’s permission to sell stock, essentially, in his dreams. But since that time, all sorts of new laws and regulations and councils and commissions had come about, and eventually if you wanted to sell stock in a mine, somebody from the state had to come down and inspect your tunnels and look at your books before granting permission to issue certificates. The Koyle Company operations eked along for decades on funding from the initial stock sale, but eventually that money ran out. And since the mine hadn’t struck gold yet, and didn’t have any revenue to speak of, it was necessary to get approval from the Utah Securities Commission to issue new stock in order to have working capital. Koyle was now forced to ask the state’s permission to make good on the promises he’d already made to the visitors from his dreams, and it irked him to no end. Moreover, upon inspecting the mine and its ledgers, not only did the state’s bean counters refuse permission to sell additional shares, they opened investigation after investigation. 

Every inquiry came to naught. Securities auditors found glaring irregularities in the books, inspectors found no hint of promising mineralization inside the mine. But when the Commission called witnesses to testify in hearings, hardly any could be compelled to speak ill of Koyle. The supposed victims of Koyle’s fraud refused to recognize their own victimhood. They still held out hope. In fact, if anything, the longer they waited for Koyle’s mine to come in, the more fixed their belief became. Eventually the state’s investigators and prosecutors threw up their hands in defeat. They seethed not for having been outsmarted by Koyle and his colleagues, but, as they saw it, for having been out-dumbed by his followers. 

Koyle became an old man. He could no longer swing a pick, so he focused on what he did best: preaching. His believers still called him “Bishop,” after all. And they continued trekking up the hill to dig in the tunnels and to hear Koyle’s latest prophecies. Weekly shareholder meetings on Thursday evenings gradually assumed the tone of tent revivals. Some attendees reported that these gatherings became so indistinguishable from religious services that they began to include the blessing and passing of the holy emblems of bread and water as a climax to the sermons from Koyle and the testimonies from his believers. Tumult in the world seemed to fuel the fervor of the Dream Mine believers and spread Koyle’s notoriety to such an extent that the May 1944 issue of Esquire dedicated a whole feature article to him and his mine. 

Koyle evaded prosecution and expanded his reach, but the passing of the Eucharist in the Thursday had been the last straw for the Church. Koyle was summoned to a court by the local High Council, who gave him strict instruction to disavow the mine and cease its activities. He initially agreed to do so, but when the Church later found him in breach of this agreement, he was excommunicated. Within his Mormon faith, excommunication meant the severing of the ties that bound Koyle to his wife, his ancestry, and his posterity. It meant he was an eternal outcast from his family who had gone before, from the children and grandchildren he’d had to bury too early, from the father whose violent death he’d witnessed. 

In his last years, Koyle privately mourned the sacrifices he had made for the mine. He was haunted by thoughts of the handful of men who had perished under his employ–slipped from a ladder, caught by unexploded ordinance, crushed by rock. Some claimed Koyle had confided that he’d wanted to get out from under the weight of the mine, but didn’t know how to extricate himself from the adoration and expectations of his followers. Others said that he secretly grieved in holy bafflement that his visions of gold had never come true. He mourned the loss of his wife, Emily, all the more bitterly for the years he’d left her to raise the children and run the farm alone while he chased gold down empty tunnels. His excommunication meant that, as far as the Church was concerned, she’d be a stranger to him in the eternities. 

All his life, Koyle had relished the darkest passages of scripture as the dissonant prelude to a glorious final cadence. Destruction and Resurrection. Apocalypse and Millennium. His whole reason for digging through the underworld was to return to light the treasures meant to adorn heaven. 

The Apostle John didn’t call what happened at the end of the Book of Revelation a dream, exactly. He said that an angel “carried him away in spirit” to show him the city of God. The angel took John to a wonderful place and showed him fantastical things and told him marvelous words. But the angel did all these things to John’s spirit, his mind, while his body stayed put. Fallible, failing mortal bodies can’t go to the place John and the angel went because that place has no death, and we mortals take death with us everywhere we go. We’re forever burning out. Sloughed skin cells and sulfurous gasses always trail behind us: literal dust-to-dust and brimstone, the exact opposite of the stuff of heaven. So John left that all behind on the Isle of Patmos when the angel carried him away to show him the City of God. Sort of like a dream. 

The first thing the angel showed him was that the whole place glowed. But there was no sun, John said, because God was there and God is the light. There was no temple, because where God is is the temple so there wasn’t anyplace in the holy city that wasn’t temple. The walls, John said, were adorned with jewels, and the gates topped with pearls. (Were they really jewels and pearls, or were precious gems simply the best metaphors John could come up with to convey heaven’s hallucinatory opulence? Would a little child have seen the same thing and come back and told everybody that heaven was Candyland?) 

The streets of God’s city, of course, were paved with gold. Not just decorated. Not just trimmed out. Paved. The walls and gates weren’t made of gems and pearls, just adorned. But the streets had gold instead of asphalt. 

This is where the economy of heaven gets complicated. Gold is beautiful enough to look at. But light doesn’t go through it and get filtered and refracted by it, like gemstones. To the human eye, gold leaf is as lovely as a gold brick. We can’t see past the surfaces of opaque things to discern and admire the beauty of their interiors. The only part of a gold nugget we can really lust after is the outermost part we can see; the gold hidden beneath the surface only has value to us because we know that others desire it. We may desire the gold on the outside because it is beautiful. But we desire the gold on the inside because it is scarce. It is scarce because it is wanted by everyone and there is not enough for everyone. So then any gold that we don’t want for beauty’s sake we can trade to fulfill other desires: hunger, lust for sex or power, pride. Relief from pain or discomfort. Immunity, or at least distraction, from sorrow. Cosmetic camouflage for the effects of aging. 

So then gold has a display value: gold says, on its owner’s behalf, “all my desires have been met.” Gold says, “I am never hungry.” Gold says, “I can go through the day and forget that I am dying.” 

And gold tells the lie: “I will never die.” 

Only the gold trod underfoot by the immortal citizens of the City of God tells the truth, because the gold there is neither currency nor commodity. It’s gravel, and God paves the streets of his city with it either because he likes the look of it or because there’s so much of it around in Heaven that He couldn’t care less. The reason that, as they say of gold, “you can’t take it with you,” isn’t just that your earthly treasure gets forfeited at the gates of heaven or confiscated at Customs on the far bank of the River Styx. It’s that even if you did manage to sneak your gold into the afterlife, it would be worthless in that market. 

That’s why the search for El Dorado, the quest for the Fountain of Youth, and the construction of the Tower of Babel are all kind of the same story, and all fueled by the same mortal folly. You can’t buy, drink, or climb your way to heaven, just as you can’t build, bribe, or imbibe your way out of dying. And yet we try. We get it in our heads that disinterring gold will somehow let us preemptively un-dig our own graves.

V.

THE DREAM OF THE NEGATIVE CONFESSIONS
FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
Theban Necropolis, near Al Uqṣur, Egypt, n.d., and Payson, Utah, 1949

It was, again, as if Koyle had somehow awakened into a dream. And again, just as on that night so many years before when he’d first been shown his mine, Koyle found himself floating peacefully, high in the air, his arms drifting up and out. A gentle motion from his legs allowed him to turn slowly and take in the scene around him. 

In the gray light of this dusk or dawn, he could only just make out the geography. He expected to see what he’d seen in his dream so long ago: the jagged ridge of the Wasatch Mountains, anchored at the south by the grand peak of Mount Nebo, which had loomed over so much of his life. In the valley bordered by the mountains he would expect to see three bodies of water: Utah Lake, the smaller freshwater lake; the Great Salt Lake, its edges receding from white flats; and the meandering Jordan River running between them. Koyle saw that there was indeed a mountain ridge, with a peak that could be Nebo. He could also make out what appeared to be the edge of a large salt-crusted lake in the distance on one side and the bluer banks of a smaller fresh lake on the other, with a ribbon of river connecting them. A part of him sensed that the proportions seemed off, the shapes and distances distorted, but that vague topographic unease was subsumed by his far greater wonder at being suspended high in the air above it all. His mind had somehow conjured for him a geological conflation, a grand cartographic contrafactum. In this dreamscape, the mountain wasn’t in fact the Nebo he knew, but its namesake — the summit near Moab (the other Moab) to which Moses climbed so he could survey the Promised Land from afar before drawing his last breath. The river was the other Jordan, the one carrying fresh water from the Sea of Galilee to the brackish bank of the Dead Sea. 

Koyle recalled with a shiver that at about this point in his earlier dream, he had tilted forward and dropped headlong toward the hillside and into the Dream Mine. He did seem to be leaning forward at the hip now, but he began to drift rather than dive. He flew, peacefully and serenely, with subtle acceleration, over hills and deserts, his face and chest to the wind and his hands and feet flowing placidly behind. He passed over vast stretches of sand, then water, then sand again, until he saw in the distance the winding green string of a tree-lined river cutting through barren desert. He descended in a wide arc toward a horseshoe curve in the river, and as he peered in the dim light he saw the faint fires of a city on the riverbank. He tried to think of anyplace he’d ever been that flanked a curve in a river like that, but in this dream state the Nile was indistinguishable from the Spanish Fork River, and for all he knew, Thebes was Thistle. On his approach, he spiraled around to the outside of the horseshoe and descended low enough to make out cobbled stones passing just below his feet. Then, moving along and just above this road as if borne by an invisible chariot, he saw he was surrounded not by a town just a few decades since its settlement, but an ancient city filled with pillars, monuments, towers, and temples. Al Uqṣur, the great Luxor–but all Koyle knew was that it wasn’t Leland. He passed down an avenue lined by regal sentry beasts, great cats, but whose necks held erect human heads. He even thought he saw, in the dim light, some faces he knew in the stone — could that be? Brother Joseph, and Brother Brigham, and the other prophets? Elder Talmage?! Their heads carved into stone on the shoulders of great limestone lions? 

But they began to race past too fast for him to catch a second look. He was accelerating–and perhaps had been all along, but hadn’t been close enough to anything on the ground to gauge his speed until now. The sphinxes flew by at this point, and looking ahead Koyle saw that the avenue led to the grand entrance of a great building. The gate was flanked by ranks of solemn statues and two large obelisks covered with carvings. He sped through courtyards and colonnades, then an ornate chamber that opened out onto the water. He sped across its surface towards the opposite bank, on the interior of the horseshoe bend. Over land again, he saw nothing but the squared shapes of stacked, quarried stones. Cairns. Monuments. Mausoleums. A sprawling, shadowed necropolis. 

With increasing terror Koyle looked ahead. He approached a hillside that sloped up sharply and away, and drawing closer he saw carved into its side a large terraced structure. In the dim light Koyle thought it might in fact be the ore mill of his Dream Mine stepping up the hillside above Spanish Fork. As he swung around into a path perpendicular to its face, however, he saw that this building was much wider and more imposing, a fortress built to entomb treasures within the mountain rather than draw them out. Eyes wide, heart racing, Koyle flew up the gradual slope of a long staircase toward the building’s entrance. As he passed the columned gate he braced himself against his imminent collision with an enormous closed door. 

At the last possible moment it flew open and blinded him with light. 

And then he was inside, shielding his eyes, but at a standstill. He slowly dropped his arms from his face as his pupils contracted. He found himself in a magnificently appointed hall. At one end of the room sat a tall gentleman, whom he took to be the lord of the house. He wore a splendid suit with a chain draped over his vest and a stovepipe hat with two long feathers sticking straight up, one above each ear. In one hand he held a cane with a crook, and in the other he held a riding crop, both at an angle so they crossed just beneath the knot of his necktie. An enormous hound slept at his feet. From galleries lining both sides of the chamber dozens of onlookers sat in silence. 

A beautiful woman appeared at Koyle’s side, nodding briefly at him before turning to await instructions from the man in the tall hat. She wore a long gown that draped in sweeping folds across her slender frame and a jeweled headband with an iridescent blue and green peacock feather tucked into it. At a small wave of her employer’s crook she took Koyle by the arm and escorted him to the middle of the room. She kept her grip on his arm, just above the elbow. Three servants of the house stood waiting nearby, in silhouette against the sconces on the wall behind them. As Koyle approached and their faces came into view, he discovered a bizarre and solemn menagerie: each of these sentries had the body of a man but the face of an animal. There was a werewolf, with a long snout and pointed, upturned ears, and two birdmen: a flat-faced falcon with a stubby beak and an ibis who glowered down his long narrow bill. 

Another wave of the crook stopped Koyle and his escort in the middle of the room, and the man in the chair spoke. “Welcome, Brother Koyle. I look forward to doing business with you. I’m told you have been hard at work for many years, and I am anxious to see the fruits of your labors.” 

At his right sat a desk with a large leather ledger and a plume in an inkwell. At his left stood a set of balance scales atop a small table. Koyle took this to mean that he was a purchaser of precious metals, and that a transaction was supposed to take place. A rush of anxiety shook him, as happens when one dreams oneself into a situation for which one is woefully unprepared. His face turned hot as he opened his mouth to explain how the gold in the mine had eluded him, but before he could speak, the man in the hat called to one of his servants. 

“Mr. Toth, would you please?” 

The long-billed man stepped forward and sat at the desk, opened the ledger, and prepared the quill. 

“I only enter into contract with those I can trust,” explained the man in the hat. “I would rather a liar leave through that door with his inventory undiminished than let him sully my scales with ill-gotten goods. Do you understand?” 

“Yes sir, but I…” 

“Good then. Mr. Toth will simply ask you a few questions, and assuming your answers are satisfactory, we will proceed.” The woman tightened her grip on his arm for a moment, then relaxed it by degrees. 

Mr. Toth pulled a notecard from his breast pocket and cleared his throat, at which sound the dog stirred awake with a resentful groan. Toth read from the notecard: “Mr. John Hyrum Koyle,” he announced, placing the notecard on the desk and turning his eyes to the ledger. His voice came out as a series of trills and gentle squawks, but Koyle could understand the words. Toth continued, “Mr. Koyle, pursuant to entering into a transaction of precious commodities with Mr. O. Cyrus West,” at which he nodded toward the man in the hat, “please affirm your good standing before God and man by repeating after me. I have not committed sin.” 

Koyle paused. He certainly did not consider himself sinless, but surely, he thought, this question simply sought to ascertain, with a ceremonial flourish, a more general sense of personal virtue. Koyle replied, “I have not committed sin.” 

Toth made a quick mark in the ledger and continued. “I have not committed robbery with violence.” 

“I have not committed robbery with violence.” Another mark in the ledger. 

“I have not stolen.”  

“I have not stolen.” 

“I have not slain men and women.” 

Koyle sniffed bemusedly, but his chuckle was met with silence. Toth waited without looking up, his pen poised impatiently. 

“I have not slain men and women.” 

“I have not stolen grain.” 

“What? Yes, okay. No, I have not stolen grain.” As Toth went to mark the ledger, Koyle began to explain, “I have laid up grain in store against hard times, but I have not–” 

Mr. Toth cut him off, moving on. “I have not purloined offerings.” 

Koyle assumed this could only refer to his stewardship as bishop over tithes and offerings, which he’d always received, managed, and distributed with utmost integrity. “I have not purloined offerings.” 

“I have not stolen the property of the gods.” 

Koyle squinted at the odd theology, but continued. “I have not stolen the property of the gods.” 

“I have not uttered lies.” 

“I have not uttered lies.” He felt a faint pang of worry in his chest as he said this. But hadn’t he always thought they were truths when he said them? 

“I have not carried away food.” 

“I have not…carried away food.” 

“I have not uttered curses.” 

“I have not uttered curses.” Of this he was confident. 

“I have not committed adultery. I have not lain with men.” 

“I… what? Good heavens. I have not committed adultery. I have not… lain with men!” 

“I have made none to weep.” 

“I have made none to weep.” Emily and the children had wept many times at the circumstances and events of their lives. But Koyle had never set out to cause anyone sorrow. 

“I have not eaten the heart.” 

Koyle grimaced. This was indecipherable to him. 

Toth looked up briefly from the ledger to explain. “This is an archaic expression meaning, I have not grieved uselessly.” 

This explanation did not help much, but Koyle assumed if it was a sin he’d committed, he’d have recognized it when he heard it. He’d had much cause for grief throughout his life, but he’d never wallowed in it excessively, had he? 

“I have not…” 

“…eaten the heart,” coached Toth matter-of-factly. 

“…eaten the heart.” 

“I have not attacked any man.” 

“I have not attacked any man.” 

“I am not a man of deceit.” 

Koyle thought for a moment about this, but if any had been deceived it was him. He’d only ever done what he was told to do in his dreams. 

“I am not a man of deceit.” 

“I have not stolen cultivated land.” 

“I have not stolen cultivated land.” 

“I have not been an eavesdropper.” 

“I have not been an eavesdropper.” 

“I have slandered no man.” 

“I have slandered no man. Though I might add there are plenty who have done so against me.” 

Toth protested the interruption with an icy pause. “I have not been angry without just cause.” 

Koyle had been angry. Oh, had he been angry. But always with good reason. At everyone who’d had a hand in his removal as bishop. At the officials who’d hounded the mine with legal challenges. At the treachery of those involved in his excommunication. At so many others whose sins and slights had more than warranted Koyle’s resentment. The thought of it brought heat to his face and a certain weight to his breath. 

“I have not been angry. Without just cause.” 

“I have not debauched the wife of any man.” 

Koyle scowled. Toth looked up with a completely blank bird face, cocking his head expectantly, as if to say, just answer the question so I can mark it in the book.
 “I have not debauched the wife of any man.” 

“I have not polluted myself.” 

“I have not polluted myself.” Koyle seethed at what he thought this might mean. 

“I have terrorized none.” 

“I have terrorized none.” 

“I have not transgressed the law.” 

Another pang, and a flash of heat. But the securities commission investigations had never been carried through to prosecution. And none of those rules about stock permits and such even existed when the angel had first told Koyle to start digging, so– 

“I have not transgressed the law.” 

“I have not been wroth.” 

“I have not been wroth.” 

“I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.” 

“I have not shut my ears to the words of truth.” 

“I have not blasphemed.” 

“I have not blasphemed.” There was a twinge of regret about passing the sacrament at the Thursday meetings, but– 

“I am not a man of violence.” 

“I am not a man of violence.” 

“I am not a stirrer up of strife.” 

“I am not a stirrer up of strife.” 

“I have not acted with undue haste.” 

“I have not acted with undue haste.” 

“I have not pried into matters.” 

“I have not pried into matters.” 

“I have not multiplied my words in speaking.” 

“I have not multiplied my words in speaking.” He remembered some sermons that had run long, but– 

“I have wronged none, I have done no evil.” 

“I have wronged none, I have done no evil.” 

“I have not worked witchcraft against the King.” 

“I have not worked… witchcraft against the King.” 

“I have never stopped the flow of water.” 

“I have never stopped the flow of water.” This was one of the only questions that made full sense to Koyle: in the mountain deserts of the West, presumably the same as in the deserts over which he’d just passed, there were few surer signs of low character than transgressing an agreed-upon irrigation schedule. 

Koyle had by now resigned himself to the odd inanity of the interrogation, and began parroting each phrase before his interrogator could even finish. Toth seemed relieved at this efficiency, and increased his tempo. 

“I have never…” 

“I have never raised my voice.” 

“I have not…” 

“I have not blasphemed God.” 

“I have not acted…” 

“I have not acted with evil rage.” 

“I have not stolen…” 

“I have not stolen the bread of the gods.” 

“I have not carried away…” 

“I have not carried away…” 

“…the khenfu cakes from the spirits of the dead.” 

“…the…. khenfu cakes… from the spirits of the dead.” 

As he repeated these baffling words, Koyle’s mild, impatient bewilderment turned into a deeply unsettled disorientation. His breath became more weighted with worry. He had no idea what world those words had come from. The suspension of horror, which normally makes our navigation of the dreamworld’s grotesqueries bearable, suddenly unraveled, and the strange figures before him fully became the terrifying monstrosities they would be if he’d encountered them awake. He began to tremble and sweat. His heartbeat accelerated and pressed against his ribs. The dog at Mr. West’s feet, sensing Koyle’s fear, pulled his lips taut and growled low and deep. Faint mutterings wafted through the galleries. The woman at his side clenched his arm once again. 

Mr. Toth continued unabated. “I have not snatched away the bread of the child, nor treated with contempt the god of my city.” 

“I have not snatched away the bread of the child, nor treated with contempt the god of my city.” 

“I have not slain the cattle belonging to the god.” 

Koyle mustered his composure, wondering how long this horror would continue, how long he could contain the terrified scream welling up inside him.

He repeated tremulously, “I have not slain the cattle belonging to the god.” 

Koyle inhaled sharply and held it, clenched against the next question. But that was apparently the end of the interrogation. He released a sigh through his teeth, and the woman loosened her grip. Mr. Toth made a mark in the ledger, scanned the figures quickly–muttering to himself and occasionally jotting in the air with the quill as if replaying the questions and answers–then initialed the bottom of the page and returned the quill to the inkwell. He turned to Cyrus West and chirped, “Mr. West, Mr. Koyle has responded to all forty-two confessions in the negative..” 

“Very well, very well, thank you Mr. Toth,” said Mr. West. He then called to the other two servants. “Mr. Horace, Mr. Antipas, the scales, please.” The falcon-faced man and the werewolf stepped forward and placed two identical weights on the two pans of the scale. They watched closely as the scale teetered in smaller and smaller swings until the two pans settled at exactly the same height. They then repeated the task, this time trading the weights to verify their equality and the proper calibration of the scale. 

Koyle spoke up with a quivering voice. “Mr. West…” 

“Please,” his host protested magnanimously, “call me Cyrus.” 

“Cyrus,” Koyle continued. “I’m afraid I don’t have any metal of value to sell you.” 

“No metal? How long have you been digging that mine?” 

Koyle coughed. “Well, sir, you see… an angel…” 

“An angel?” said Cyrus, incredulously. At this, the woman at Koyle’s side let out an overdue snort of laughter. Koyle turned to her with a glare. She squeezed his arm harder and cleared her throat to regain her composure. Then she nodded Koyle’s attention back toward Cyrus. 

“Ahem, yes sir,” Koyle continued nervously, “an angel appeared to me in a dream and showed me the gold inside that mountain. I… I know it’s there, we just haven’t found it yet… We’ve had some assayers come out who have found some very promising trace metals that we think…” 

“What do you mean, trace metals?! I thought you said there was a vault of treasure! This wasn’t supposed to be just a mine. This was supposed to be a treasure dig. You weren’t just looking for a vein of ore, you were looking for piles of ingots and buckets of coins!” 

“Well, you see, over the years, I came to realize that God was testing us. Testing our faith. We wouldn’t find the treasure until the time was right. Until the world needed it. Until He needed it.” 

“So, an angel showed you the gold inside the mountain, but then God hid it from you?” 

“Yes, uh, until we’re ready.” 

Cyrus drummed his fingers on the cane and the crop, in three brisk rolls from pinky to pointer. “So,” he confirmed, “you’re not ready.” 

“When we are ready, if we have faith,” Koyle asserted, though he could not mask the nervous tremolo in his voice, “the mine will come in.” 

Cyrus’s face broke into a smile. “I’m not sure I believe you,” he said, “But I think you believe you. Frankly, even a two-bit charlatan would be more convincing than you are. I just don’t think you have the guile for a con-man. Mind you, I don’t think you have the mining skills of a two-bit prospector with a three-legged mule, either. But I don’t think you’ve come here on false pretenses.” The dog growled louder, as if protesting his master’s generosity. 

“If you please, then, I will show myself out,” said Koyle. But the woman clenched her hand more tightly than ever around his arm. 

“Nonsense,” insisted Cyrus. “I believe you have misunderstood the nature of this transaction, Brother Koyle. You are not in the parlor of some merchant of metals. You are standing before the judgment seat of God. My job is not to measure your gold–fortunately for you, since you have none. My job is to measure your heart. Please step forward.” 

The woman nudged him toward the scales, which he approached hesitantly. She pulled the feather from her headband and handed it to the werewolf. The falcon-faced man reached out his hand toward Koyle. “May I?” he chittered, gesturing toward Koyle’s breast. Koyle paused, not knowing what was being requested of him. Before he could ask, the falcon-faced man reached right into Koyle’s chest cavity. His fingers passed cleanly through Koyle’s clothes and proceeded painlessly through skin and bone, until his whole fist was inside Koyle’s rib cage. Koyle shuddered and gagged, but soon noticed that he wasn’t struggling for air or losing blood. He relaxed enough to notice the unusual sensation of a large, foreign object jostling for space within his torso. He could feel the falcon-man’s hand fishing around between his lungs, the fingers finally settling around Koyle’s heart. He felt the slight pressure of the hand, but his heart continued to beat. The falcon-faced man then gently pulled, and with only a bit of tug and recoil, pulled Koyle’s heart out of his chest. Koyle watched it, horrified, as it continued the jostling motion of its ordered operations. He placed his hand over the spot where his heart should be. There was no blood, no wound, no rip in the cloth. Just a slightly sunken spot under the skin. 

The hound, now on his feet, erupted into frantic howling before Cyrus’s crop swatted him sharply on the haunches. He let out a yelp that diminished almost immediately into a resentful growl.
 “At my word,” Cyrus pronounced, “Mr. Horace and Mr. Antipas will place Mr. Koyle’s heart and the Feather of Truth on the scale. If they weigh the same, such that the scale balances exactly, Mr. Koyle will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven.” 

The falcon-faced man placed the still-beating heart on one side of the scale. The werewolf placed the feather on the other. With a mutual nod, they released both sides so that the balance arm could move freely. It teetered momentarily, dipping toward the feather, but then Koyle gasped in fear and his beating heart on the scale lurched and the feather rebounded while the heart plummeted. The balance arm of the scale continued swinging, in smaller and smaller angles, but just as the heart and the feather appeared to hang precisely in balance, the heart would spasm and the scale would restart its swinging. The heart clenched again and again, erratically, sending the balance arm swinging wildly. Then Koyle watched in horror as his heart leapt from the tray of the scale, landed on the table, and rolled off the edge. 

Koyle lunged, reaching frantically with one hand for his heart as it fell toward the floor, and with the other he clutched at his chest, where the heart should be. He hit the floor and cried out. 

The nurse rushed to the doorway of Koyle’s hospital room to call for help, then ran back to his bedside. Koyle was clenching and convulsing. It was clear that the valves and arteries of his heart, which had been slowly succumbing to sclerosis and inflammation, were staging their final struggle. She rechecked the dial on the blood pressure cuff and called again to the doctor. Then she glanced at the clock and patted her pocket for a pen in case the time would need to be recorded before he arrived. 

VI.

Payson Chronicle 
20 May 1949

DREAM MINE HEAD CALLED BY DEATH

John Hyrum Koyle, head of the Koyle Mining Co., known commonly as the “Dream Mine,” which is located in the mountains east of here, died shortly after 9am Tuesday in the Payson hospital of a heart attack. He had been in the hospital several days. 

Mr. Koyle, who was head of the mine for over 50 years, repudiated all claims to divine guidance with regard to the mine in a public statement Jan. 7, 1947. 

He was excomminication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints April 16, 1948, for insubordination.

VII.

THE DREAM OF THE RESONANT ROOM

I am John Hyrum Koyle, Junior. I am sitting in a room. It is a resonant room, and I am speaking aloud into it. On the table before me are two Edison phonographs. I have been made to understand that the one on the left is affixed with a recording stylus and a fresh wax cylinder so that it can record sound. The one on the right is affixed with a playback stylus and has no cylinder on it at the moment. On the floor to the left of the recording phonograph there is a bin full of additional wax cylinders. On the floor to the right of the playback phonograph there is a barrel with no bottom. The wax cylinder on the recording phonograph is spinning, and the stylus is cutting a groove into the wax as I speak these words. The phonograph is recording the sound of my speaking voice. 

I have been made to understand that I must tell the story of my mortal life, briefly, before I am allowed to continue on my eternal journey. 

I was born in 1864 in a dugout in Spanish Fork, Utah. I died in 1949, at the age of eighty-four years. I was a husband, father, and grandfather. I was a missionary and a bishop. I was a farmer and a miner. I had many dreams and visions. Some of them were realized in life. Many were not. Some were true. Some were false. 

I am sealed by eternal covenant to my parents, John Hyrum Koyle, Senior, and Adlinda Hillman. I am sealed by eternal covenant to my wife, Emily Arvilla Holt, and to our children. I am sealed by eternal covenant to my ancestors and my posterity. 

I have been made to understand that I stand in breach of those covenants for the sin of covetousness. 

I have been made to understand that I stand in breach of those covenants for the sin of purloining offerings. 

I have been made to understand that I stand in breach of those covenants for the sin of apostasy and evil-speaking. 

I have been made to understand that I stand in breach of those covenants for the sins of pride and vain ambition.  

I have been made to understand that after God raised the city of Enoch up to Heaven, because they were of one heart and one mind and had no poor among them, He wept over the residue left below, because they, also, were the workmanship of His hands. 

I have been made to understand that, after all we can do, it is by grace that we are saved. 

I have been made to understand that I am to speak of times when I was spared death. Shortly after my birth, a snake crawled through the thatched mud roof of the dugout and landed on the bed near my mother and me. At age four, my head was nearly crushed by a wagon wheel. At age nine, my body was nearly crushed by stone. I have been made to understand that on many other occasions I was spared death by perils unknown to me.  

I have been made to understand that I am to speak the names of those who preceded me in death, that they might hear me and draw me to them. 

My father, John Hyrum Koyle Senior, whose mortal body was crushed by stone. 

My mother, Adlinda Hillman Koyle, whose mortal body endured seventy-two years. 

My wife, Emily Arvilla, whose mortal body endured seventy-four years. 

My daughter, Emeline, who was born still. 

My son, Jesse, who lived on the Earth but one hour. 

My son, Hyrum, who lived on the Earth but twelve days. 

My daughter, Amy, whose mortal body succumbed to an infectious fever at age five. 

My son Silas, whose mortal body was crushed by stone. 

My daughter, Mary, whose heart failed at age 38. 

My grandchildren taken as babies: Doris, Doris Thorun, Violet, Bernice, Francis, and Fern. 

My grandson Rodney, whose mortal body succumbed to the Spanish Flu and pertussis at age 3. 

My granddaughter Elaine, whose mortal body succumbed to her many ailments at age 4. 

My granddaughter Venice, whose mortal body succumbed to kidney failure at age 11. 

I have not been made to understand the death of children. I have not been made to understand the mourning of parents. I will not– 

I have been made to understand that I am to speak the name of Leigh Owen Gardner, who died of a broken neck at the bottom of a mine shaft at age 26 while looking for gold in the upper workings of my mine. I am to speak the name of Reed LeRoy Weight, who died from the explosion of a faulty stick of dynamite at the bottom of a mine shaft at age 25 while looking for gold in the lower workings of my mine. I am to speak the name of David Nephi Kunz, whose mortal body was crushed by stone at age 17 while shoveling gravel at my mine. 

I have been made to understand that I am to speak the names of those by whom I am survived, that they might remember me and plead on my behalf. 

The posterity of my daughter, Mary. 

My son, John LeRoy, and his posterity. 

My daughter, Sarah Eveline, and her posterity. 

My daughter, Adlinda, and her posterity. 

My daughter, Emma Rebecca, and her posterity. 

My son, Ross Fielding, and his posterity. 

My son, Merrill Scovil, and his posterity. 

My daughter, Lucille, and her posterity. 

I have been made to understand many things. I have not been made to understand why I never found gold, after doing everything the angels asked of me. I have not been made to understand why I was made to suffer persecution and derision. I have not been made to understand why I was made to deceive and be deceived. I have not been made to understand why my humiliations were laid bare. I have not been made to understand why– 

I have come to understand that there are no more questions followed by answers, only understanding upon understanding. 

I have come to understand that the forces and workings of the Earth and the reckoning of time by God can render gold as abundant as sand and as worthless as dross. 

I have come to understand that the Garden of Eden was a place of abundance and the fallen world is a place of scarcity, and that the Devil’s only power is desire and that man only desires that which is scarce. 

I have come to understand that scarcity is no longer. 

I have come to understand that desire is no longer, because there is no lacking followed by having. 

I have come to understand that time is no longer, because there is no before followed by after. 

I have come to understand that all truth can be circumscribed into one great whole. 

I have come to understand that beauty is not a means to an end but an end unto itself, and that beauty as an end unto itself is love, and that love in infinite abundance is God. 

I am no longer speaking aloud, but I am still in the resonant room. I have removed the wax cylinder from the recording phonograph on the left, gently brushed the wax shavings from its surface, and placed it on the playback phonograph on the right. I have placed a fresh wax cylinder on the recording phonograph on the left. Both cylinders are now spinning, the one on the right to play and the one on the left to record. The playback phonograph is projecting the sound of the words I finished speaking a moment ago–about the story of my life and death and my understanding of God–into the room. The recording phonograph is now carving the sound of my speech second-hand onto the second wax cylinder, as the first wax cylinder plays. 

I have not been made to understand the purpose of this activity. I am waiting, and listening. I am hearing my words repeated back to me. There are some things I wish I had spoken better, or differently. There are some things I wish I had not spoken at all. I spoke as I was made to understand. But I have come to understand that now I am done speaking. I am only listening. I am listening to myself tell my own story and say the names of the people in it. I am listening to the practical theology of the dead and the damned as it issued forth from my own mouth and wound its way down the funnel of the recording phonograph and through the recording stylus and dug itself into the surface of the wax cylinder. I am listening to the voice of one who seeks redemption. I have come to understand that all voices seek redemption. That all words that issue forth from the mouths of men are pleas for unearned mercy. That each word is a bucket of dirt and stone, dug from the end of the furthest drift, hoisted up through the dark by one windlass, then another, then another and another and another, until it reaches the surface and is dumped out onto the dugway and assayed for truth. 

The repetition of my speech recorded onto the first wax cylinder has finished playing. I have been made to understand that I must now remove the cylinder from the playback phonograph and drop it into the barrel with no bottom on the far right. I am to remove the second wax cylinder from the recording phonograph on the left and place it on the playback phonograph on the right. I am also to take a third new wax cylinder from the bin on the far left and place it on the recording phonograph. Both phonographs are now spinning again. The one on the right is playing, the one on the left is recording. I have been made to understand that I am to repeat this procedure: that each new wax cylinder will proceed across the table, first recorded onto, then played. I am still not speaking. Only playing and recording and listening. 

 My recorded voice sounds clean, even beautiful, in this resonant room. It is unblemished by the crackles and scratches, and by the tinny, nasal quality, that are usually heard on phonograph recordings of human speech. The wax cylinder spinning on the playback phonograph has captured my voice just as it sounded to my own ears when I spoke the words into the resonant room. 

No, not just as it sounded to my ears when I spoke. It is a little bit different. It sounds like a voice speaking into a resonant room, but also the voice is being played back into the resonant room. The resonance of the voice heard in the room is compounded by the recording of the voice being played into the same room. I am hearing the room speak through my voice, and through the recording of my voice, and now through the recording of the recording of my voice, in the room. 

I am now completing the process for the thirteenth time. The thirteenth wax cylinder is on the playback phonograph on the right. I am placing a new wax cylinder, the fourteenth, on the recording phonograph on the left. The bin on the far left contains many more unused cylinders. I am dropping the twelfth wax cylinder into the bottomless barrel to the far right. The recording of my voice slowly changes with each repetition. The consonants are softened, the vowels opened up, by the compounded resonance of the room. It would begin to be difficult to understand the words now, if I had not said them myself, and if I had not heard them repeated so many times here in this room. 

I am now completing the process for the thirty-fourth time. What I hear now is the rhythm of my words. The arcs of phrases and the cadences of conclusions. I hear repeated words like irregular turns of a crank: 

…sealed by eternal covenant… sealed by eternal covenant…sealed by eternal covenant… 

…and her posterity…and her posterity…and her posterity… 

…stand in breach…stand in breach…stand in breach… 

I also hear when the rhythm is interrupted, as when, in my recitation of the names of my survivors, I paused for a brief moment to reflect on my granddaughter Venice, in the hospital, her jaundiced eyes staring down death unblinking. 

I am now completing the process for the fifty-fifth time. The supply of unused wax cylinders appears entirely undiminished. I can only make out certain words now, the ones whose blunt shapes or sharp edges push through the room’s crystalline chords. 

…born still…born still…born still… 

…crushed by stone…crushed by stone…crushed by stone… 

…come to understand…come to understand…come to understand… 

I am now completing the process for the eighty-ninth time. The voice of the room is far stronger now than my recorded voice speaking into it. My words have evaporated into the atmosphere and absorbed into the air. The sound rings like backwards bells, humming, whispering, telling itself to shush so it can hear itself, then shushing, then ringing out again to be heard. 

I have now repeated the process two hundred and thirty-three times. It is all tones. They waver slightly in their loudness, but the pitches are the steady drones of the room’s resonance. 

I have now repeated the process six hundred and ten times. The tone is steady and nearly unwavering throughout the whole recording. Just one long hum. 

I have stopped counting the number of repetitions of the process. I have to listen very closely to hear any difference at all between one repetition and the next. I have come to understand, however, that I must continue a short stay longer. 

I have now repeated the process many, many times. I have come to understand that there is no bottom to the bin full of wax cylinders. I have come to notice, over many, many repetitions of the process, that the tone is slowly becoming a wash. It makes a noise like sand. Like leaves. It is becoming like the sound of rushing water. No, deeper and broader. It is becoming like the sound of rushing rock, the insatiable living earth. 

This sound is continuing. It is much longer than my speech. It is longer than all the words I said. It is longer than all the words I ever said. I look at the cylinder on the playback phonograph. I see that the sound of my voice, which has become the sound of the earth, is no longer inscribed on a spiral extending down the length of the wax cylinder. It is carved in a single loop around the cylinder and matches up with itself perfectly so that the stylus is not carried forward. The cylinder continues spinning, and the playback stylus remains fixed in the repeating groove. 

The cylinder stops spinning. I lift the stylus. The resonant room is silent now. I remove the cylinder from the phonograph and hold it over the barrel. I release it, and I wait for the sound when it hits the bottom. 

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Excerpted and adapted from The Dream Mine, a novel.
Inspired by the life and lore of John Hyrum Koyle, Jr. (1864-1949).