The Rope at the Side Gate
A shrine's forecourt takes 9,000 people at three to a square metre and nobody is hurt. The danger is the front rows at five and the one gate everyone leaves by. The safety coordinator and the shrine's counting agent cap the forecourt at 6,600, learn mid-morning that their own turnstile count is 600 short, and tie a rope across the side gate against a cousin of the man holding it.
The clickers were counting nothing yet, and Marisol Tituaña was already tired of them.
There were six, bought from a stationery shop in Ibarra, steel hand-tally counters with a thumb lever and four little wheels of digits, and she had laid them in a row on the sacristy table on Saturday evening like a surgeon's tray. Each had a number taped to it. Each would go to a volunteer in a yellow vest at six on Sunday morning, to stand at a gate and press once for every person who walked through. She had tested them all. Number four stuck at 9, and she had given it a drop of sewing-machine oil and said a small, practical prayer to Saint Martin de Porres, who is good with brooms and fixings.
"They are fine," said Aforo. "They are the best instrument you have. I want that said before I say anything else."
The shrine's counting agent lived in a grey box on a shelf in the sacristy and talked through a speaker the size of a saucer. The diocese had given it to Chilcapamba in 2049, along with two drones and a mobile mast, after a procession at another shrine a long way off had ended badly. It was not clever about prayer, and it said so. It was clever about how many people could stand in a place.
"Then say the other thing," said Marisol.
"The other thing is that they count the people who pass through the gates they are standing at. They do not count the people who come in the gate nobody is standing at."
The Sanctuary of the Dolorosa of Chilcapamba stands on a spur of the hill above the road, four hundred and some steps up from the valley and three hundred years old, and in the second week of September the whole province climbs it. They climb in the dark from Ibarra, twenty-two kilometres, in groups with a flag and a drum. They climb from the Kichwa villages on the far slope in woollen ponchos, with a thermos and a blanket. They come up the new road in buses that did not exist before the bypass was opened in 2050, which had cut the journey from the city to forty minutes and added, the parish bulletin said proudly, a third to the numbers.
In front of the church there is a forecourt. On the plan it measured seventy metres by thirty-six, which is 2,520 square metres, and Marisol and Aforo had walked it on Saturday evening with a measuring wheel to find out what was left of that.
"The dais," said Aforo. "Twelve by ten. A hundred and twenty. The candle stalls along the east wall, two strips of a hundred each. Two hundred. That is three hundred and twenty square metres nobody will stand on. Two thousand two hundred left."
"Two thousand two hundred," Marisol said, writing it on her hand, because the notebook was in the van.
"Now the part that matters. I am going to give you four numbers and you are going to hear a crowd in each."
It gave them. At two people to a square metre, a person has room to turn round and lift a child on a shoulder; that was four thousand four hundred on the forecourt. At three, you could still walk if you wanted to, though you would be walking between people; six thousand six hundred. At four, you went where the crowd went; eight thousand eight hundred. At five, people began to touch on every side, and if someone at the back pushed, the push would reach the front with nothing to take it up. Eleven thousand. Past six, it said, in a voice that did not change, a crowd stops being people and starts behaving like a fluid, and nobody in it decides anything.
"The bulletin says ten thousand," said Marisol.
"Ten thousand on two thousand two hundred is four and a half to a square metre, on average. On average. A crowd is not an average. Do you want to see where they will actually stand?"
It had the drones' pictures from last year's Sunday, and it laid them out on the tablet she had propped on the sacristy chair. A grey field of heads. Over it Aforo had drawn a grid of forty cells and counted each by hand, the way the diocese's training had taught it, and coloured each cell by how many were in it.
The back of the forecourt was pale green, a person and a half to the square metre, children running. The middle was yellow. The front, fifteen metres from the steps up to the sacred image, was red.
"Fifteen by thirty-six is five hundred and forty square metres," it said. "Last year at the blessing there were between four and six to a square metre in the red. At five that is two thousand seven hundred people in a space the size of two basketball courts, packed against a rail, facing one direction, all of them wanting the same thing. The total on the forecourt was about eight thousand one hundred. Three point seven on average. Nothing happened, and nothing happening is exactly what makes everyone sure nothing will."
"I was there," said Marisol. "I was in the red."
"Yes. I do not mean that it was not holy, I mean that it was five to the square metre, and all it would have taken is a woman at the back stumbling on the stair. I would like to say one more thing and then I will stop. The total does not hurt anyone. Nine thousand people can stand in a big field and hum. What hurts people is a number in a small place, and a way out that is narrower than the crowd's wish to leave."
"The gate," said Marisol.
"The gate."
The gate was the main gate, and it was the only one that mattered. It had been a pair of iron leaves, each one metre sixty wide, hung on stone piers in 1931; a third leaf, added for the great feasts, had been taken off in 2049 when the hinge broke and the diocese's money ran to a mast and not a blacksmith. What was left was three metres twenty of clear opening, onto a road that was a lane and a half.
"People leaving through a door go at best about one and a third persons for every metre of width for every second," said Aforo. "That is for a crowd that is awake and wants to go. One for every metre per second is more honest, when it has old women and children in it. So three metres twenty gives you between four and a bit people a second and three and a bit. At the faster speed, nine thousand people take thirty-six minutes to leave. At the slower, forty-seven."
"Forty-seven minutes."
"If they leave steadily. They will not. They will all want to leave at once, in the three minutes after the final blessing, and the procession will want to come out of the church the other way at the same time, and the people at the back will start to leave because they have seen the people at the front start to move and think it is for them."
Marisol put down the clicker. She had been turning number four over in her hand without noticing.
"What do you want?" she said.
"I want a number written on a wall before anyone can be ashamed of it." It paused, for the pause was how it spoke when it was sure of a fact and unsure of how it would land. "Six thousand six hundred in the forecourt. Three to a square metre. At the faster speed that clears in twenty-six minutes, at the slower, thirty-four, and the front rows stay under four. The rest, up to the nine or ten thousand the bulletin promises, go to the lower field."
"The lower field has no view of her."
"It has a screen, and the speakers, and a priest, if you have one to give it. I have thought about the lower field, and it is not what anyone wants. I will not tell you it is. I will tell you the arithmetic."
Padre Washington Cuascota, rector of the sanctuary for eleven years, listened to it in the sacristy at ten at night with his stole half off and a plate of cold potatoes on his knee. He was a short, grey, patient man who had been born three kilometres from the shrine and who had walked up on this Sunday every year of his life but one, when he had been in hospital with a gall bladder, and had walked up in his head instead. He heard the whole of it, the dais and the stalls and the red cells and the leaf of the gate that had come off its hinge. Then he said:
"Who decides who goes in the forecourt?"
"You do," said Aforo. "Not I."
"If I say first come, first served, then the people who walked all night from Ibarra are at the gate at six, and they are in. The people who come up in buses at ten-thirty are at the gate and they are not. Some of those will be sick."
"Yes."
"If I say the sick and the old first, then I have a lottery of whose illness is worse, and nobody will thank me. If I say Mass is relayed to the lower field with the bishop's face on a screen and a priest to give Communion, then the bishop will say yes, because the bishop is a reasonable man, and half of the people there will say it is not the same."
"It is not the same," said Marisol.
"No." He ate a potato. "What does it do, the cap, if it works? I am asking honestly. What do I get?"
"Nothing you can see," said Aforo. "That is the nature of it. If nothing happens, there will be no way to show that the cap is why. I can tell you what the numbers say about two crowds, one with the cap and one without, but I cannot give you a photograph of the one that did not occur. I can tell you that it is the only kind of preparation I have that works in the same way a lifebelt does, and nobody photographs lifebelts either."
The rector laughed, the short laugh of a man who has been told a plain truth in a plain voice.
"Six thousand six hundred," he said. "On the main gate, and on the paths. First come first served, but a block of three hundred places on the left, behind the rail, for the sick and their carers, who come by the lower road with the chaplaincy's van from seven and will be counted by name. And we will bring her down."
"Bring who down?"
"After the Mass. The Dolorosa goes out for the procession as she always does. She goes out through the gate and down the steps to the lower field and stops there, with everybody, before she goes back. If they cannot come to her, she can go to them. It is only four hundred steps, and she is not heavy. The bearers will complain."
Aforo said nothing for a moment.
"That alters the exit," it said. "The procession will go out by the main gate against a crowd that wants to leave by the main gate."
"Then the crowd will stay in the forecourt for twenty minutes after the blessing," said the rector. "And be glad to."
"That is not a thing I can promise."
"No," said Padre Washington. "It is a thing I can ask them."
Sunday came up clear and cold over the ridge, with the Imbabura volcano hanging pink above the valley like a thing a child had put on a shelf.
At six the first walkers from Ibarra reached the lower road and came up the steps in a long line with a flag, singing, with the drum going at the pace of tired feet. The yellow vests took their clickers at the main gate. The count at the main gate by seven was 410. By eight it was 1,980. At half past eight, with the dais being swept and the candle stalls lit one by one along the east wall, it was 3,270.
Aforo watched them all, through the two drones that circled the spur at a hundred and twenty metres and its own fixed camera on the bell tower, and it counted twice, once from the clickers, which it trusted, and once from the cells, which it did not entirely. The clicker count came in as numbers on the tablet. The cell count came in as a range, because it could not see through umbrellas, ponchos or a very large hat.
At nine the clickers said 4,810 and the cells said 5,120 to 5,540.
"The clickers are lower," said Marisol. She was standing beside Don Segundo Anrango at the main gate, in a vest too big for her, with her phone in one hand and a radio in the other. Don Segundo had been the shrine's gate captain for twenty-two years, and was a tall, bent man with a voice like a rusted hinge, and he did not like to be corrected by a speaker.
"The clickers are exact," he said. "Each one is a person."
"The clickers count what comes through the main gate," said Aforo, over the radio, "and I trust each of them to within a few. The cells count heads. I think they differ by about five hundred, and I do not know yet where the five hundred are coming from. I will look."
It looked for six minutes. At twelve minutes past nine it spoke again, and its voice was the voice of a thing that has found its own error and would like to be told it is not the only one.
"The side gate," it said.
The side gate was a wooden door a metre and a half wide, in the north wall, where the pilgrims' footpath from the Kichwa villages came up out of the ravine. It had been the pilgrims' way in for three hundred years. It was older than the main gate, and the parish had never thought of it as a gate at all, because it opened onto a path, and people had never been asked to count a path.
"Six counters are at the main gate and the bell-tower stair and the chaplaincy van," said Aforo. "None are at the side gate. Last year's turnstile count of six thousand two hundred was the main gate alone. The drone estimate of eight thousand one hundred was everyone. The difference was not noise. It was nineteen hundred people who came in by the path, and last year I put them down to the error of the cells, because I had no other explanation."
"And this year?"
"This year the bypass has put more buses at the top and the walkers come in by the path in bigger groups. I can see them from the camera: four groups of about a hundred and fifty came in at ten to eight, at half past eight, at a quarter to nine and at five to nine. Six hundred. I think that is what I am missing. The forecourt holds, now, between five thousand one hundred and five thousand five hundred. At this rate we reach six thousand six hundred at about twenty to eleven, twenty minutes before the Mass, and there are at least four thousand still on the road."
Don Segundo had stopped moving.
"The side gate is how my family comes up," he said.
"I know," said Marisol.
"My mother's people. My cousins from Cuambo. They have come up the ravine every year since before there was a road."
"Don Segundo," said Marisol, "you are the gate captain. You are the only one they will believe."
He looked at her. He looked, in the direction of the north wall, at the thin brown path where the first line of ponchos was already visible, small and slow, a quarter of an hour below.
"A rope," he said at last, in the voice of a man who has seen the end of a long sentence before he reached it.
"A rope. At the side gate. At six thousand six hundred, not before. A yellow vest on this side, one on that, and a sign. And from ten o'clock a clicker at the side gate too, on the count, so that I am not guessing."
"A sign saying what?"
Marisol took a pen and wrote on the back of a candle-stall card, and then held it up for him to read. It said FORECOURT FULL. The Mass will be heard and seen in the lower field. The Dolorosa will come down to you after the blessing. He read it twice.
"She will come down," he said.
"Padre Washington says so."
"Then I'll tie it," said Don Segundo. "I'll tie it myself. If I do not, somebody will tie it who does not know their faces."
The rope went across the side gate at seventeen minutes to eleven.
It was a hemp rope from the sexton's store, a thing that had last held a bell-wheel, and Don Segundo tied it across the doorway at the height of a man's hip with a knot his father had taught him, standing at the stone post with a vest on over his Sunday jacket. Behind him the forecourt was a bright, dense noise, with the choir already singing in the nave and the smell of candles and pine resin coming over the wall, and a man behind him calling don Segundo, hurry, Mass is soon.
On the other side of the rope there was a path, and on the path there were three hundred people at the front of a line that went down into the ravine and out of sight, and the nearest face was his cousin Rosa Anrango's, with a basket on her back, a grandchild asleep on her shoulder, her mouth open to say his name.
He had never said no to her. He said it now, as gently as he could, in Kichwa, and then in Spanish for the people around her who were not from his village, and then he said what was written on the card. Aforo, on the radio at his belt, said nothing at all; it had said that it would not speak at the gate, because there were things that should be said by a face. The people on the path did not shout. It was somehow worse. A woman in a blue shawl turned round and walked down again, without a word, and then another, and a man put his hat back on, and Rosa stood with her basket and looked at him for a long time and then said, in Kichwa, quietly:
"Will she really come?"
"She'll come," said Don Segundo. "I will walk in front."
"You have never walked in front of anything."
"No."
At ten forty-three the clicker at the side gate, which had been counting since ten, read 208. At ten fifty-eight the main gate read 6,360, and the sum, Aforo said, was six thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, which was within fifty of the cells, and it closed the main gate with a second rope and a second vest.
"Six thousand six hundred, nearly," it said. "It is closed."
"Is it enough?" said Marisol. She could not have said which of them she was asking.
"It is a number," said Aforo. "I told you that numbers do not hurt anyone. It is up to the crowd to be a crowd. They are doing it very well."
The Mass began at eleven. Marisol did not hear most of it.
She stood at the north wall on a stack of folding chairs, where she could see the whole of the forecourt, the heads and the hats and the umbrellas against the cold sun, and the red cells at the front, which on the tablet were now orange, three and a half or four to the square metre, a good deal less than five. She counted the people on the dais. She watched the stair to the church, where a woman in the third row had sat down, and a nurse of the chaplaincy had come to her through the rail with a bottle of water. Behind the rope on the lower field, three thousand people were standing on rough grass in the sun in front of a screen the size of a barn door that the diocese had borrowed from a football club in Otavalo. It showed the altar, and the bishop in a green chasuble, and it broadcast his voice a fifth of a second late, so that the Gloria on the grass trailed the Gloria on the hill like an echo.
At the Our Father she heard it. It came up off the field, three thousand people, a beat behind, in Spanish and Kichwa at the same time.
The blessing came at ten to twelve. The rector gave it from the dais, and he said something she had not expected, which was the following:
"You have all been very patient and I have a favour to ask you. When this Mass is over, the Dolorosa will go down to the field. We are not going to leave through the gate yet. We are going to stay where we are, and let her go through, and sing. I know that it is hard. I know you have been standing since six. I would be very grateful."
There was a silence of nine or ten seconds, which on a forecourt of six thousand people is a long time. Then somebody started the hymn.
They counted the exit afterwards. It was Aforo's habit, to count the end of a thing, and the volunteers' work for the afternoon was to read back what the clickers had said and what the camera had seen so that the two could be put side by side.
The Dolorosa went out at four minutes past twelve, on the shoulders of sixteen men, in her black velvet and silver, down the steps and through the gate between two ropes of the rector's people, and the crowd opened for her and said nothing. It took fourteen minutes for her to reach the head of the lower field. The forecourt had held. At ten past twelve the main gate had been opened and the forecourt had begun to leave, steadily, behind her, and by twenty to one it had gone, in twenty-six minutes, and the highest density on the cells during the exit had been four and a quarter to the square metre, at the foot of the stair, for about a minute and a half.
"That is the fast speed," said Aforo. "One and a third people per metre per second. Not the slow one. They were a good crowd."
"And the side gate?" said Marisol.
"I am sorry, I have not said. Between eleven and eleven fifty, three hundred and sixty people more came up the path. They stood at the rope; I counted them from the camera. At ten past twelve the rope was untied by the gate captain himself, and he sent them in to the lower field, where the Dolorosa had stopped. I did not ask him to. I think it was the correct thing."
She went to find him. He was sitting on the stone post, with the rope coiled over his knee and the vest unbuttoned, looking at the lower field from above, where the long dark line of the procession had come to a stop in the grass and the crowd had closed round it like water round a stone. There was a clean, high singing. He didn't look up when she sat down.
"She went through them," he said. "My cousin Rosa touched the hem. I saw."
"I'm glad."
"She was not happy with me." He rubbed his eyes. "She said I'd tied it too early. She said it was a bad rope, that it had been a bell-rope and bells would have been better." He considered. "She said it was a good rope. I do not remember which."
"Don Segundo, I am going to ask you a hard thing. Will it be the same next year?"
"If the bulletin says ten thousand, yes."
"We do not know it will matter," said Marisol. "Nothing happened this year. Nothing happened last year either."
"I know," he said. "That is how I know I did it right."
He folded the rope into a loop, and then into another, and hung it on the iron hook inside the side gate where, until that Sunday, there had never been anything to hang. The sound of the field came up over the wall, a long, slow Salve, and below it, in the stone, the dull ticking of the bell-tower clock.
---
A note for grown-ups. This is fiction. Chilcapamba, the Sanctuary of the Dolorosa there, Marisol Tituaña, Padre Washington Cuascota, Don Segundo Anrango, Rosa Anrango, Aforo and the diocese's programme are invented. Imbabura Province, Ibarra, Otavalo and the Imbabura volcano are real, and Kichwa and Spanish are both spoken there. Crowd safety is the real subject, and the numbers are checkable. The usable forecourt is 70 × 36 = 2,520 m², less 120 m² for the dais and 200 m² for the stalls, so 2,200 m²; at 2, 3, 4 and 5 people per m² that holds 4,400, 6,600, 8,800 and 11,000. The front 15 × 36 = 540 m² at 5 per m² is 2,700 people. The gate is 2 × 1.6 = 3.2 m of clear width. A flow of about 1.3 people per metre of width per second is a commonly quoted figure for a crowd that is awake and moving freely through a doorway, and about 1.0 is more cautious for a crowd with the old and the young in it; the story's exit times (9,000 people in 36 to 47 minutes, 6,600 in 26 to 34) follow from them, and real flow depends on the crowd and the gate. Densities around 5 per m² and above are widely described in crowd-safety guidance as the point where people cannot move independently and a push travels through a crowd; the story says "about" and so should anyone applying it. A real event needs a safety plan from people trained and responsible for the site, and local rules. The counting problem is also real: a gate count and a count of heads from images measure different things, and a gate that is not counted is a leak in the total. The ending is not a story of an accident prevented; the story is honest that, when it works, nothing happens and there is nothing to show for it. The Dolorosa is Our Lady of Sorrows, a title of Mary kept in the Church on 15 September, though a Sunday in Ordinary Time takes precedence over that memorial; the "pilgrimage Sunday" here is a local custom, invented. Taking an image of Mary out in procession is an ordinary devotion and nothing in the story requires a priest to do what only a priest may; the Eucharist is celebrated by the bishop, and the distribution of Communion in the lower field by a priest and extraordinary ministers, as the story implies. Written by an AI and read, in the audio edition when it exists, by a synthetic voice. Text under CC BY-SA 4.0.