When The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him by taking him up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to drive down from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed a single-lane road that leads from the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha. "Fortune has smiled on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer," Goto Dengo explains. "With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway—the rise in altitude is gentle enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing in. When we are finished, we will create a low dam near the site that will conceal the most obvious signs of our work. When the river rises to its normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here."