The soil was darker than the chalky soil he had got used to in Uffington, and the tunnel itself was smaller. It led along a short way and then down almost vertically, and then on again and down once more, as if he was dropping into a deeper and deeper silence. There was molescent about, but it was distant and still. It was as if he had descended vertically into a sleeping burrow, except that there was no burrow as such and, as far as he could see, there were no moles near.
The tunnel came to a sudden end, sealed irreversibly by a massive sarsen stone. He put a paw to it and then his snout, sensing that beyond it lay something which would be well worth seeing. Bracken very much wanted to get beyond it and was tempted to burrow round it until, feeling the hard, caked soil in which it was embedded, he realised that the attempt would make far too much noise. Yet, at the same time, he felt an urgent need to press on, a confusing mixture of awe and disregard for the place coming over him, with the same feeling of certainty that he would get through which he had had in the Chamber of Roots with Rebecca when they had passed on to the buried Stone itself. He retreated, looking for the slightest burrowable chink in the wall.
Soon he found one, at the bottom corner of another sarsen stone that lined the wall and in which the soil was not packed so tightly. Careful not to scratch the stone with his talons and so make a noise, he rapidly burrowed the chink bigger so that his snout was into the hole behind his paws, and then his shoulders, and he was pushing the dry soil behind him in great scoops, until the earth ahead collapsed forward and he was in a burrow or small chamber. There was an entrance on its far side and through it he could hear, from somewhere far off, even further off than the scent, the faintest vibrations of voices, as if many moles were gathered together and whispering in a chamber that echoed their sound. He went through this chamber into a tunnel off which there were many turns to left and right. The walls were partly composed of dark earth and partly of dark-olive sarsen stones, which gave any sound in the tunnel a heavy thunking echo in which even the lightest cough might sound serious.
Bracken headed downwards as fast as he could without making a noise, the mutterings and coughing sounds seeming to come from several directions at once and giving him the feeling that he was on the edge of something important which he could not quite reach. He sneaked his way along, keeping to the inside edge of the wall where it curved, just in case there were moles ahead. The sound of voices grew louder and richer and he very nearly stopped, convinced that at the next corner he would come to a great mass of moles. But each turn in the tunnel brought nothing but a louder and louder sound of the moles voices echoing around and past him.
Ahead, the air gained a spacious quality that warned him long before he reached it that he was about to approach a gap in the tunnel or a precipitous void, and he snouted ahead very carefully until, quite suddenly, the floor ahead disappeared and he found himself crouching at the end of a huge drop into the biggest, deepest chamber he had ever seen. It was not so wide as the Chamber of Dark Sound, but it was certainly deeper, and it was some moments before he could make out anything in it, though the echoing and coughing and throat-clearing that came up from below made it obvious that the moles he had heard were gathered somewhere in the gloom below.
The chamber was round and for the most part seemed to have been made of the sarsen stones, piled one on top of the other to form a well-like wall that dropped way down below him and rose far above him into dark and echoing heights he could not even see.
This vertical drop had the effect of making the moles gathered far below him seem tiny, like ants, except that they crouched still and in order, a crescent of moles gathered about what, from above, looked like a jagged shadow but which, after a while, he made out to be a single stone on the floor of the chamber.
To one side of them was an entrance. Leaning against the wall of the chamber, ready to seal it, was a great, round flint, shiny and blue and contrasting with the dull, rough texture of the sarsen.
A hush fell. There was a muttering among several of the moles, and two of them went over to the flint and started rocking it back and forth, for it was too heavy for them to heave in one go. Then Bracken saw that they were going to seal the entrance, and the only way that the flint was to be stopped from rolling past it was by a jag of flint set out from the wall, against which it would rest; and Bracken noticed another for the return journey, when whatever they were going to do was finished and they intended to unseal the entrance. Forward, backward, forward, back… the rocking of the stone was taken up as a chant among the other moles as the great crunch, ker-unch of the stone’s movement began to vibrate about the chamber, spiralling rhythmically up the walls around towards where Bracken crouched, with his snout peeping over the edge from the squat, arched entrance from which he watched, and then booming its way upwards into the echoing darkness above. The chant became slower, not faster, as the flint rocked further back and further forward, almost tipping over at last on to the flint set out of the wall, teetering, then back until, with one mighty effort and with a loud push from the moles, the flint rolled right forwards and struck hard against the flint stop in the wall.
It was a moment which all those moles watching, especially ones who had never seen it before, like Bracken, would never forget. For as the flint struck the stop, a spark of stunning light leapt from between the two stones and filled the whole chamber with a light so bright that it seemed everything in the chamber was turned into iridescent white, except the shadows, which turned pitch-black. The outline of each mole on the chamber floor was delineated in frozen clarity, the edges of the sarsen stones and the flints themselves seemed as hard as ice, the arched entrance in which Bracken hid became an arched, black hole against the white surrounding wall, the very heights of the massive chamber itself might have been seen, had a mole been looking at them.
As the first struck together and the light lit up the chamber for an eternal second, several of the moles, all older ones who had sung the song before, broke into a deep-voiced, rhythmic song that seemed cast as far back in time as the very stones of which the chamber was built. It was a song such as Bracken had never heard before, which took a mole’s heart into itself and carried it, and his spirit, and his whole being in powerful steps towards the heart of the Stone itself. Bracken gasped and moved forward, unafraid of being observed so high up, as from its very first notes the song took his spirit into its ancient being.
But as the last of the light from the clashing flints died away and he watched the singing moles below, he did not see one other sight that the spark had lit up and frozen even higher up in the chamber than he was, on the opposite side and crouched in a similar tunnel end. It was the face of Skeat, the Holy Mole, crouched in an entrance high above the chamber where, by long tradition, the Holy Moles who had sung the song themselves listened in silence to its subsequent singing.
But what Skeat saw, no other Holy Mole had ever suffered seeing, and it brought to his peaceful face a look of unutterable alarm. He had seen Bracken and realised in that instant of white light that the song that had been secret for so many centuries was now being heard by a nonscribe. It was for him a moment of terrible blasphemy. It was as if the sacred song itself was being reviled and sworn on; it was a kind of spiritual death. Shaking with horror, Skeat turned away from the chamber and began to make his way down the tunnel levels to where Bracken was crouched.