When the Mountain Sweats

Southern Peru, 1891. Francis Bramley signs off rotten trestle bridges for a mining company he loathes and drinks to forget the brother who vanished into the cordillera. Then muleteers dump a dying surveyor in his yard — mercury-poisoned, toothless, carrying a hammered silver plate scratched with a route and a warning about a water gate that opens only when the mountain sweats. The route leads to a hidden vale, a fortune in silver, and a lake straining behind three-hundred-year-old stone. Francis is not the only man who can read it.