‘No.’ The gully closed around us. Dark now, no sign of the dawn and the place eerie in the headlights, a gaping mouth with quartz like ivory molars showing through the earth’s red gums. I reached the old mine workings, and where they’d once loaded the tip trucks, I was able to back and turn so that the Toyota faced downhill. I switched off the engine and sat there for a moment, listening.
‘Wot’s s’matter — scared?’
Her face was a dark blur, her voice a little sharper.
‘Perhaps,’ I said, thinking of Ed Garrety and his father and the dead miners. Bad spirits all longa that mine. A cold shiver ran through me, though it was hot as an oven here with the day’s heat trapped by the rocks. Hard gnarled fingers touched my bare arms. ‘Yuh goin’ down?’
‘That was the idea.’
I saw the dark shape of her head nod. ‘Just be careful, that’s all.’ The fingers were stroking my arm, a caressing touch. ‘Ed’s never been down. He told me that once. Nobody’s been down since it was closed.’
She took her hand away and reached into the back, passing to me the miner’s helmet with its lamp and the battery attached to a belt. She had a geological hammer, too, and a haversack for rock samples. We also took a coil of nylon rope with us and a powerful hand torch. Then, as we started up, picking our way round the black gaping holes of the early workings, she gave me the lay-out of the mine as near as she could remember it from listening to old-timers in the bar. There were four levels at approximately one hundred feet intervals, the lowest, at four hundred feet, being the one that had been flooded following the cave-in. The reef itself more or less followed the fault line that had formed the gully. It was between four and eight feet wide and went down at a fairly steep angle, about 40° she thought. At the eastern end it petered out. At the western end it was badly faulted, and it was at this end that the cave-in had occurred.
‘And nobody’s been down since then?’
‘Not as far’s I know.’ She was short of breath now, her voice wheezing.
‘Too dangerous, is that it?’
She turned her head and looked at me. ‘Want to go back?’
‘What about the ladders? There are ladders in the main shaft, aren’t there?’
‘That’s how the survivors got out.’
‘But that was thirty years ago. They’ll all be rotten by now.’
‘Wood don’t rot so easy in this climate.’
We reached the rock outcrops and the beam of the torch picked out the heavy boarding of the door, new screws gleaming bright against the rusted metal of the bolt. The piece of timber Garrety had jammed across the entrance the previous night lay discarded on the ground. Some time during the day he had been back and secured the door. But with a screwdriver from the truck’s tool kit it was a simple job to release the bolt, and then we were inside the mountain, walking along the adit tunnel, which was just wide enough to take the tip trucks. The walls were rock, a brownish red colour and soft enough to show the marks of the miners’ picks. Red dust covered the tramlines scuffed by the feet of last night’s intruders, the air warm and slightly humid, a musty smell.
I counted 217 paces before the adit opened out into a man-made cavern with a gaping hole in the floor and timber supports for the hoist. A bucket hung there on rusted wires that ran over a pulley and down to the drum of a coal-burning steam engine with its chimney running up into the roof. It was all very primitive and entirely derelict.
Prophecy shone the torch down into the shaft, the two of us hanging on to the baulks of timber and peering into the depths. The shaft went straight down, a rope ladder falling to the staging of the first level, then wooden ladders continuing on down to what looked like the gleam of water at the bottom. Nothing seemed to have changed since the mine had been abandoned, except for that rope ladder secured to one of the timbers of the hoist. The other ladders seemed all right. It was only this first section that had gone and I wondered about that as Prophecy began to pull the rope ladder up. ‘Seems sound enough,’ she said. ‘Home-made, by the look of it.’
The ladder was formed of two lengths of rope, knotted at intervals to support the slats of wood that formed the rungs. The rope was old, but it was good thick manilla, and it wasn’t frayed or rotten. The slats, too, were sound, though they were of several types of wood. It looked as though it had been made on the station and I was thinking of Ed Garrety going down alone as I lowered it back into the shaft.
‘Yuh’d better tie the nylon round you just in case.’
I could feel the tension growing in me as I put on the helmet and buckled the belt around my waist, easing the lead from the battery up to the back of my neck and switching it on to test. The light from the reflector on my helmet was bright on the rock walls. ‘Battery all right?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘One thing Nobby taught me. I always keep it charged.’ She handed me the end of the nylon rope and I tied it round my chest under the armpits. She had already passed the coil round one of the wooden timbers. She knew what she had to do and I slipped the haversack on and tucked the geological hammer into my belt. ‘I’ll be two or three hours at least,’ I said. ‘But I’ll call to you up the shaft. If a whole hour goes by without my calling, then you’d better go for help.’
She nodded, and I ducked under the timbering and lowered myself into the blackness of the hole, feeling with my feet until I had found the first of the slats. I saw the ropes take the strain as my full weight came on the ladder, then I was moving cautiously down it, my face close to the rock and Prophecy paying out the nylon safety rope from above. The ladder hung close against the rock wall of the shaft and I had to kick it out at each step, to get a foothold on the slats. The staging at the first level was still sound and I swung myself into the cavity, slipping out of the nylon rope and using the end of it to secure the ladder to the wooden frame. Then I started along the narrow tunnel.
It was a cross-cut and quite short. In a moment I was in the main gallery and had turned east along the line of the sloping. At this level the technique was crude, large pillars of gold-bearing quartz having been left to support the over-lying rock. It was safe and with proper shoring the pillars could have been mined. After about two hundred yards the pillars became shorter, the reef gradually narrowing to the point where it was no longer workable. I went back then, past the cross-cut to the shaft, the going gradually becoming more difficult as I encountered roof falls. The rock at this western end was badly fractured with areas of definite instability, and the reef came to an abrupt end at a point of major faulting.
I went back to the shaft, called up it that I was okay, and then I took a chance and went scrambling down the sloping itself. Beyond the second level the roof pillars became fewer, the overburden supported by hand-built walls of red rock. The air had got to it, of course. It was quite humid at this depth, with moisture glistening on the walls, and this had helped the process of oxidization.
Those two levels were enough to convince me that the mine was valueless. Prophecy’s information was largely correct. The reef had had a width of between four and eight feet, inclining down at an angle of roughly 40°. At the eastern end it virtually petered out and at the western end it ran into very heavy faulting.
There was granite here, but in the main the overlay was a mixture of iron and silica with some shale, and it was this the miners had used to shore up the roof. Even supposing the reef continued at depth, the place was about as safe as a derelict coal mine with all the pit props rotted. Start drilling and shot firing anywhere underground and the whole thing would collapse.
I was at the third level then, the ground under my feet no longer dust, but packed firm, and damp in places. Tramlines showed intermittently, twin lines of rusted iron, and suddenly in the light from my lamp I saw the outline of a heel, hard and clear. A little further on, where the floor was almost mud, the imprint of rubber-soled shoes was quite distinct. It gave me an uncanny feeling, alone down there in the bowels of that abandoned mine and knowing that somebody else had been down there recently, might still be down there. No, that was ridiculous — pure imagination. But there was no doubt. Those footprints were quite fresh.