"I’m serious," he said. "What sort of mine requires a million board feet of timber?" For the overwhelming impression given by the photographs was of planks and beams, thousands of them, silver with age, splayed and flattened in some sort of slow-motion disaster that ran all the way down the side of a small mountain. As if the world’s biggest timber flume, a waterfall of rough-sawn planks coursing down the slope, had suddenly been deprived of water and had frozen and shriveled in place.