Mole after mole complained to Boswell and Bracken that something was wrong, very wrong, and they were afraid, very afraid. The Stone was angry and something was going to happen to them. And everymole they met complained of something they themselves had noticed in Barrow Vale: there was an unpleasant infestation of fleas in the tunnels all over the system.
So it was in a mood of foreboding that Bracken and Boswell turned at last up to the slopes and towards the Ancient System. The slopes were more populated with youngsters than Bracken could ever remember having heard of. Unable to find territory in the main system because its residents were keeping a larger portion of it for themselves, many youngsters had come to the traditionally impoverished slopes and established a meagre existence for themselves in the dilapidated tunnels that were distant remnants of the original migration from the Ancient System. They were a skinny, frightened, sorry lot, somehow symptomatic of the arid days through which the system was going. Most ran away and hid when Bracken and Boswell approached.
‘The whole system’s falling apart,’ growled Bracken once when this happened, unaware that just as once he had been afraid of fully mature adult males, so these timid youngsters were afraid of him. Had Boswell been by himself, the story might have been different, for Boswell was the most approachable of moles.
Hulver’s old tunnels were unoccupied and they entered the ancient tunnels by the route carved out by the side of the owl face by Mandrake. As they did so, Boswell felt obliged to reveal to Bracken what Rebecca had told him about their experience together in the central part of the system and what they had found together under the Stone. But whereas before Stonecrop’s visit Bracken would surely have been angry, now he seemed, if anything, relieved.
‘Did she tell you all that? Well, it’s true enough, though it seems so removed from me now that I sometimes think all that happened to two other moles. You can’t go backwards, Boswell.’
Ostensibly they went to find out what the food supply would be like in the Ancient System, but having quickly established that it was no better there than anywhere else, the journey became a tour of the system conducted by Bracken for Boswell’s benefit.
They stayed there for three days, and in that time Boswell learned more about Bracken than he had ever known before. They went over to the cliff edge where Bracken had first entered the system; they travelled down the communal tunnel towards the centre of the system; and they entered tunnel after tunnel and poked their snouts into many burrows even Bracken had not seen before.
Bracken spoke simply about the past, making it sound almost as if it were a different mole he was talking about, but describing all the fears and excitements of the original exploration.
‘Really, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much to see. It’s a deserted system, that’s all, with just the central part having any great interest… perhaps I’ll show it to you before we go back to the main system,’ Bracken said mischievously, for he could see Boswell’s excitement at everything they saw—and, indeed, it rubbed off on to him.
So, when they finally reached the Chamber of Dark Sound, they were both equally excited, and ran down the final length of tunnel towards the echoes like a couple of youngsters. Boswell noticed that Bracken’s old good humour had come back—away from the main system he seemed more relaxed. Perhaps at heart he was a solitary mole, perhaps that was what was wrong—he could never be solitary in Barrow Vale.
The chamber was the same, except that the entrance to the tunnel to the most central part of the system had fallen in where Mandrake had destroyed it, and the half-buried bones of the henchmoles killed in the fight remained among the soil and rubbish. There was a way through, however, dug out no doubt by Mandrake during the time he lived in the tunnels alone.
The atmosphere, which had been dark and dangerous when Bracken first came there, was somehow lighter and more neutral. Bracken did not feel nervous about it, and dispassionately showed Boswell the embossed walls, whose patterns still gyrated and wound across the surface, changing into heavier, deeper patterns nearer and nearer the centre where the owl face, still threatening, hung. How had he ever been afraid of it all!
‘You know what I found out?’ said Bracken, finding it strange to talk normally in this once-terrifying place. ‘If you hum in a certain way, you get sounds back.’ He was about to show how when Boswell suddenly looked warningly at him, raised a paw and said quietly: ‘Be careful, Bracken. You don’t know what you’re doing.’
Bracken began to protest but, as sometimes happened, there was a quality of fierceness to Boswell’s expression that made him hold back his words. His mouth opened and then shut, and it was Boswell who spoke.
‘This wall is the work of long generations of graced moles. It is a wall of hope and warning and it is true that by humming in a certain way, something you have stumbled upon, you may get some of the power from its ancient script. There is a wall like this in Uffington, as there is one in each of the seven chosen systems. They are not to be played with and are traditionally guarded by a mole not only great in body, but wise in spirit as well. It was said that such a guard never left his place, which is at the centre of the wall, whatever calamity befell.’
Bracken remembered then the mole skeleton that had so frightened him at the entrance in the centre of the wall, the seventh entrance. So that had been the guard, and some calamity had befallen the Ancient System. Yet he had stayed. Something of the awe that Bracken had once felt was returning in the face of Boswell’s transformation beneath the wall from follower to aide to teacher.
‘What is the wall for, then?’ asked Bracken rather humbly.
‘It protects the most holy part of the system, the system beyond that entrance. Its shapes carry the voices of the moles of the past and the proper way to approach it is with a chant in the old language, which all scribemoles should know, though these days, alas, many do not know it well enough. If I were still a scribemole and bound by my vows, I would not be able to tell of this, or let you hear the language. But now, Bracken, I am beginning to see that the Stone works its wisdom in ways we cannot understand, and I think it has made me free so that you, who carry so much… may hear the wall’s proper sound.’