As they ran into the ins and outs of Bracken’s confusing tunnels to the centre, they could both feel the Ancient System alive before them, stretching far beyond in tunnel after tunnel, alive with the warm spirit of Longest Night. There was no fear at all.
Bracken led on into the circular tunnel and turned right through one of the flint entrances and into the labyrinth of echoes, pausing for a moment for Rebecca to catch up. The pattering of her paws echoed on into the darkness ahead of them and she whispered, ‘Listen. Listen! Oh, it’s so beautiful. Listen!’
Bracken ran now into the sound of the echoes, twisting and turning each way and every way towards the roots, not even checking the way he went with his memory, for he no longer needed to, he could hear the way ahead, he knew the way, he knew the way. His Rebecca was close with him, her paws pattering with his, her warmth behind him, they were twisting and turning, weaving and wending their way together, as one mole, running as one, no effort, their bodies in unison.
‘Oh, listen!’ he could hear her whispering, or hear the echoes of her whisper whispering, ‘Listen, listen, my love, my love… ’ deeper and deeper into the labyrinths until the confusion of whispering echoes was all about them but they were one mole together, so beautiful, so beautifully echoing around them until at last they were there by the roots, shadows and falls of rising roots as silent and utterly motionless as the trees on the surface in the still night to which they belonged.
‘Listen, my love, listen!’ whispered Rebecca, running ahead of him without pause and entering first among the great roots which rose massive about her, with Bracken following her paws, following her warmth, following his Rebecca, my love my love, the echoes following them both from the labyrinths behind them, fading away behind as they entered deeper and deeper among the roots, one mole running, moving as one, each mole knowing the way as one. The roots grew bigger and thicker, twining about this way and that, seeming to open before them, the sound of their silence all about them, the sound of silence running ahead of them, Rebecca running on without fear and Bracken behind and fissures in front and over them, over them, on and round, and through and under and over and beyond and on past the roots for shadow after shadow, each twist falling straight, each turn not a turn, the route so easy, so easy for them both together.
Then, as suddenly as they had entered the Chamber of Roots, they reached its end, which was a massive impregnable wall rising up into darkness and made of hard chalk subsoil with great nodules of flint poking out of it like the snouts of huge moles. Their eyes travelled from one brooding shape to another, and then behind them, back to the mass of roots that now seemed quite impassable but through which, somehow, they had come. It was a fearsome sight but neither Bracken nor Rebecca felt fear, for they now looked at the ancient world about them as if they were pups in a world in which harm did not exist.
Bracken now took the lead, turning left along the wall and following its rough and ancient surface round, and round, until they came, as he knew they would without knowing, to an entrance to a tunnel. It was small, crudely burrowed by somemole for whom shape and form no longer mattered. Its floor sloped roughly downward, twisting among the flints that were held in the chalk and determined the detail, though not the general direction, of the tunnel.
From beyond it an ancient sound came, the sound that had been heard for whole ages and eras before even moles roamed the earth; the sound that accompanies the rise and fall, and rise again, of trees and woods and whole forests of trees. The sound of an ancient tree whose huge trunk carries the vibrations of both life and death. The sound of a tree whose roots are alive on the outside and carry life up into the new wood and branches but whose central core is now dry and sacrificed and whose hollow secret darkness stretching high out above the surface may be the home of bats or insects, butterflies or birds, but which below ground, where Bracken and Rebecca were, only carries the sound of a sleeping life that waits to be reborn in the wood’s decay.
They had arrived at the roots of the tree that encircled the Stone in the centre of the clearing. The tunnel now was burrowed out between living and dead roots—the dead roots’ stillness being the peace against which the life of the living roots was set. The roots plunged down into the ancient tunnel, forcing Bracken and Rebecca to squeeze round or between them, on and on, now more slowly and with a deepening sense of being at one with each other and the system that radiated all about them.
The further they advanced along the tunnel, the more its walls seemed to be made up of roots as well as chalk, so that they had the feeling that the tree was all around them, the final guardian of the Stone.
The tunnel grew smaller about them, the dryness of its walls now catching their fur as they advanced and its sound deepened and hollowed ahead of them so that Bracken slowed still more, recognising from its pattern that ahead of them lay a chamber greater than any he had discovered in the Ancient System so far.
There was a mass of debris and dust ahead that blocked the lower half of the tunnel and over whose top Bracken could not see. Cautiously he pushed it forward with his right paw, trying to flatten it down a bit, but it just fell forward and away, the debris sliding away from him in an avalanche, dust rising, and then a long, long silence before, far below them, it cascaded and echoed down on to some unknown, unvisited floor. As the dust cleared, they saw ahead of them the vast round of the old tree’s central hollow, which rose above them to unknown heights of ancient wood, and below to where the debris had fallen. The tunnel gave way to a precipitous path torn out of the side of the hollow and round which they started now to go, the wall of soft wood on their right flank, a void of darkness on their left. It spiralled round and down, and they followed it slowly, feeling as if they were travelling into a past that held in its waiting silence the future as well.
Then Bracken stopped and, half turning back to Rebecca—the narrow path would allow him no more movement than that—he pointed a talon at a sight ahead of them that made her gasp with wonder.
It was a massive jutting, jagged corner of stone, the Stone, around which the tree had girt itself and whose roots had pushed and pulled at it so that in their embrace the great Stone had tilted up and forward towards the west, towards Uffington, until here, deep below ground, the corner of the base on which it had originally stood had risen off the ground and ridden into the hollow depth of the tree itself.
The path traversed right down to the Stone, and then under it, leaving the wall of the hollow as it followed the massive, and now dead, root that had first, as a tendril thinner than a single hair of fur, crept under the Stone so long ago.
Into this holy secret place Bracken and Rebecca now moved, the base of the Stone now actually above them and plunging down ahead of them to the very centre of the Stone and the Ancient System itself.
Then the path widened on to a floor, if floor it was that was half chalk, half soil, half debris, all crossed and intertwined with the arms and bent haunches of long-dead roots. The Stone’s base was above them still, but as they advanced further, clambering over the ancient obstructions in their way, they saw that it plunged suddenly down some distance ahead to form a kind of hollow or cave beyond which, no doubt, the furthest part of the Stone had buried itself finally into the chalk, mirroring in its depth the heights of the other part of the base which tilted above them.