my professor will probably tell me this sucks, or is cliche, or has poor structure...ass

The word ­hades was substituted for sheol when scribes translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. Hades was the realm of the dead where all mortals go. Tartarus was a section of it, the kind of Hell we would be accustomed to imagine. Here the Hell was a pit in the earth, a residence of suffering and pain. After death, souls of the mortal world would be judged, and those unworthy would exist in the pit for eternity. The original sheol happened closer to reality. Sheol, too, was known as a pit, a hole, an abode in the earth. The difference is in the judgment. Sheol became the destination for both the good and the bad, yet still inescapable. I think the Hebrews had it right.

PA-150 takes you from the beginning of the Tocantins river down to the Great Carajás Project. The section of the Transamazon highway goes on for kilometers, at least an eight hour drive, and that’s only until the expanding urban center of Marabá. Along the way, you’ll note a gradual disappearance of forest trees, of the familiar açaí palms, of the common river traders so typical in images of the Amazon; it is replaced by squatter settlements, livestock production, and logging regimes. Eventually, you reach a fork in the road at PA-257; you’re almost at the very south of Pará state. Here you’ll find the prelude, a roadside memorial called Eldorado dos Carajás-it has nothing to do with gold. A large wooden memorial was raised for the shooting of nineteen landless farmers-by the state military police-in 1996 for attempting to claim unused land for their displaced families. But you can go further still, there’s more.

Follow the Transamazon past Paraupebas and you’ll arrive at the Great Carajás Project. In 1967 a United States Steel Company helicopter flew over the Carajás site and, low on fuel, made a forced landing. They found below them a mineral reserve of 66% iron concentration. Not willing to allow a foreign company control over such wealth, the Brazilian government found a way for control to fall into the grip of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, now known as VALE. In 1985, VALE obtained complete control over the mineral deposit, over 1.5 billion tons of iron ore. A year later, the government helped construct the Carajás Rail, linking the site with export ports in the neighboring state of Maranhão, along the Atlantic. The highways linking the port cities of Belém and Sao Luís in the states connect with the dam up north, all part of the political and developmental climate of the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. “Land without people for people without land”, that was the saying. Within a decade large hydroelectric dams sprouted from the black soil to feed the demands of the great industrial consumption in the south of the state.

The Great Carajás Project is the largest of those.

It is also the largest mine in the world. Like a vortex, it sucks in and consumes labor, offering pay to the poor, to the landless that it at the same time displaces. The cycle and pull of the machine never ends, and the foreign and domestic demand never falls. From space, from the map, you might think it was a canyon, something beautiful. Didn’t the Greeks have that understanding of the word beautiful, meant to portray the beauty and at the same time terror of an entity? But still, the Hebrews must have had it correct. Sheol drew in the worthy and the unworthy. And here, all seem unworthy for what lies within The Project. Debt labor, cardiovascular disease, and the other forms of death associated with strip mine projects. We in the United States are no stranger to it in our development past either. Do you remember the incident in Pennsylvania last year? Virginia?

Instead, we face not being able to imagine that kind of Hell, as foreign to us as the old Hebrew hell is to hades. Instead, there is the inability to process it from the scale I was let to see it, up against the railing of the view area. All I do is hear a few stories, interpreted to the group through a company translator. All I get to see is the portraits of a few web sites. And see the movement of rock from below. The scale from GoogleMaps only goes so far, but I can still see the detail of the red earth, a gash, a fissure, a pit, an abode from above