At six on Wednesday morning Amparo Benavides was opening the stall at the foot of the talud. The stall is a wooden table with a cloth over it, and behind the cloth there are two racks of rubber boots and a crate of helmets.

The procedure is simple. Whoever goes up says the size. Amparo takes the pair, sets it on the counter, collects the deposit and writes a line in the notebook: time, size, name if he gives one. Whoever comes down brings the boots back and takes the deposit, less the rental. If the boots come back with a cut, the cut is paid for separately.

At the end of the row, at the end that faces the road, there is a new pair, a brand pair, with a yellow sole and the tag still attached to the shaft. It costs two days of rental. In three months nobody has taken it. Amparo brings it out every morning with the others and every evening puts it back in.

At six the rubber is cold. Amparo touches it to know what time it is, the way others look at the sky.

The talud came away in the afternoon. Those who were there say it was not a noise. They say that for a second the noise was missing, that is, that the compressor, the voices and the water in the channel stopped together, and that the roar came afterwards, when it was already over.

It was not an explosion. It was the wall coming down whole, in one piece, onto the lower part where the work is done.

The vereda went up first. They went up with the shovels from their houses and with their hands, and in any case there was no other way, because the firemen from Policarpa arrived forty minutes later, the ones from Pasto after two hours, the ones from El Tambo around seven. Three fire brigades, three different times, the same road.

The DAGRD of Nariño gave the first count that evening: thirteen dead, seven injured. An hour later the injured were seventeen. Nobody corrected the first figure, and in any case nobody had disputed it: they were simply two counts made at two different moments by two different people.

Among the thirteen there were four people from the same family, quillasinga, who had gone up together the way people go up together when the shift is a family shift.

On the counter, among the wet rubber and the overturned helmets, a phone went on ringing all evening. The ringtone was a cheerful song, the kind people set as a joke. Nobody picked it up. Someone asked whether there was still coffee. Another said the generator was burning too much and that at that rate they would be dry by eleven.

Amparo stayed behind the counter. She looked at the racks. She looked at the gaps in the row, which were more than the lines written in the notebook, and they stayed more than the written lines even when they began bringing the boots down from the talud, in pairs and unpaired, and putting them on the cloth in front of her without saying anything.

The generator came on at twenty past seven and the row of boots became visible again behind her. The commander who had come from El Tambo had his helmet under his arm. He asked how many people had gone up that afternoon.

Amparo looked at the notebook. The notebook was open at Wednesday's page, which had twenty-two lines written and the twenty-third begun and not finished, because at two the water truck had arrived and she had got up.

"Twenty-four," she said.

"Twenty-four rentals?"

"Twenty-four people."

The commander wrote. Then he stopped with the pen still and looked up, and in that moment it was clear to both of them that the number written in the notebook was a different number.

"You are sure."

"I am sure."

She did not explain the two boys. She did not say that they had gone up at three without paying, with boots from the bottom row and a helmet that had already been repaired once, and that she had given them to them because one of the two had said he would pay on the way down. She said only twenty-four, and she said it a second time when the commander asked her to repeat it for the radio.

At twenty to eight they moved two teams to the upper sector.

They dug on the upper sector all night. The community held the lights. The firemen from Pasto worked in shifts of forty minutes because the ground kept moving.

At dawn on Thursday the commander came to the counter and said they had finished. He did not say how it had ended. He left her the number of an office in Pasto written on a piece of cardboard, and the cardboard was the lid of a box of gloves.

Amparo waited for him to go. Then she began to put things back in order.

She took the pairs from the heap and lined them up on the counter with the soles towards her, size by size, from thirty-six to forty-three. She counted the gaps. She put the sizes back in order. She said out loud, as she had said every morning for forty years: "Soles towards me, toes out, that way you can see the number."

Then she looked at the row and did it again. Soles towards me, toes out, that way you can see the number.

At the end of the row, at the end that faces the road, was the new pair, with the brand printed on the shaft and the tag still attached. Amparo moved it ten centimetres. Then she put it back where it was. Soles towards me, toes out, that way you can see the number.