Between where he was and the shelf of rock that skirted Big Allen, a flat circle of stone paving like the rim of a round pond was embedded in the turf, was now indeed partly overgrown by the turf and heather, and in its grassy centre the dark-wooled sheep were grazing. Peter and he had often wondered what this circle was, had thought it ancient, as old perhaps as the Foinmen themselves. Stephen now knew that it was centuries younger than that, a crushing circle on the rim of which a horse had walked round and round, pulling the heavy stones that crushed the lead ore out of the lighter rock. He began to walk towards the foin, not exactly reluctantly, but feeling pinpricks of trepidation now that the time had come to enter the mine again.
Two derelict coes, mine buildings erected over climbing shafts and in which the miner had kept his tools, lay to the right of him. One of these was a ruin, no more than a heap of stones, but the other, though nearly roofless, still stood. Stephen had been inside the coes before to check how thoroughly the old shafts had been filled in and blocked. He dropped his rucksack on the ground inside the stone hut that was known as the George Crane Coe, and set off with the rope slung over one shoulder, the candles in his pockets, and carrying the torch.
This time he found the entrance to Apsley Sough without difficulty. He anchored the rope to the protruding lip of rock just as he and Peter had done seventeen years before. But this time he found himself to be less single-minded than he had been then. As far as he could remember, in those days he and Peter had thought of nothing but of getting into the mine, of nothing but the adventure ahead. Now he was hesitating, feeling the warmth of the sun on his face as it permeated the mist, even gazing across the dale to what he had sometimes written of as the finest view on Vangmoor, the prospect of Blathe Foin with Tower Foin rising stark behind it, gazing as if he might never see it again, as if the earth he proposed to enter might swallow him up for ever.
With the rope and his supply of light, though, he was quite safe. He knew that. It even seemed rather silly to have hidden his rucksack, for there was no one anywhere on the moor. He hadn’t seen a soul since leaving Chesney, and then only the milkman and the boy who delivered the papers. The moor had been deserted since the second murder. Apart from man’s vestiges, the remains of surface workings, it was as it must have been before man or the animals came, peaceful, bare and in the morning mist, mysteriously veiled.
He parted the bushes at the opening to the shaft and peered down. Dark, a stony, earthy smell, nothing to be seen. He took the rope in his hands and lowered himself down until his feet found a purchase in the footholes that had been cut haphazardly out of the rock wall. The shaft was about two feet six in diameter, a narrow slanting tube in the roots of the mountain.
He had gone down quite a distance before he switched the torch on. The gleam of light at the mouth became a remote spot, a point only, then, as the shaft bent slightly, disappeared altogether and Stephen was left in the dark. The torch supplied a splendid broad light, a clear radiance, though perhaps rather chill and sinister. He was surprised to find that now he was in the mine he wasn’t at all afraid. He felt as excited as he had done when a child.
But one of the differences was that he was much taller, and the chamber into which the shaft led, which he remembered as eight feet high, he now saw was a good deal less than this, not much more than six, for he could only just stand upright in it. He held the torch aloft and surveyed the cavern, the ‘rake’ from which the vein had been stripped, leaving the bare, rough, dark limestone. Out of the chamber led the coffin level tunnel which he and Peter had followed until they met the bad air. Since then he had learnt that this kind of cutting was called ‘coffin level profile’ because the tunnel was tapered at the roof and sole so as just to admit the human form. The miners hadn’t been as tall as he. In making his way along it, he had slightly to stoop.
After a while, though he had forgotten this, the tunnel or winze in which he was met another at an acute angle to it. He had come along one of the prongs of a fork and now continued, holding his torch up in front of him, along the winze that was that fork’s handle. Inside the mine it was utterly silent. No doubt it had been so that other time, but the presence of Peter must have made it seem less so. Now he was aware of the most profound silence he had ever known. Outside on the moor, in the heart of the moor, it was quiet enough, but that silence was nothing to this. Out there the wind sighed or whistled, birds called, there was a constant, softly humming insect life, aircraft passed over. In here was the silence of the subterranean, that which is called the silence of the grave. It was not so much an absence of noise as a presence of total quiet. It was as if he had become stone deaf. He stood still for a moment, listening to the silence, living in a deafness where he could hear the thoughts turning and proceeding inside his head.
Down a passage to the left of him had been that wide gallery whose farther end was blocked by a fall. He walked a little way into the passage. It was just the same, nothing had changed in those seventeen years, not even a particle of stone, a fragment of shale, or so it seemed to him, had been added to or had fallen from that barrier of rubble. So it would still be, all of it, in a thousand years. Though the civilized world might be destroyed and the surface of the earth distorted, though the moor became a desert, this labyrinth would remain unchanged, neither added to nor depleted, scarcely a grain of dust moved, a maze of silence.
It was not far from here that their candles had gone out. Stephen lit a candle and switched off the torch, He made his way along, holding the candle on the saucer. There was a tunnel here, a low-roofed winze, he and Peter hadn’t been into. It fell away from the main artery at a slight but steady downward gradient, and after a while Stephen noticed that the pieces of shale which formed the floor were damp, were moist, were now lying in half an inch of water like pebbles over which an incoming tide creeps.
He held up the candle and looked ahead of him into a huge cavern. It was a hall in the mountain that surely must have occurred naturally, so lofty was its roof and so wide its walls. It had no floor. Or, rather, what floor it had was submerged under the lake of water, unruffled, motionless, black as pitch, that filled the cavern. Stephen switched on his torch again, and in the brighter light looked with awe at the still sheet of black water and the great vault above it. He couldn’t remember that he had ever before seen standing water in which no vegetation of any kind grew. But here there was not even a wisp of green scum, not a shred of moss or thin, drifting leaf, only the gleaming water, black as flint. He must be looking, he thought, at that part of the workings he had sometimes heard referred to as the Bottomless Pit.
That meant he was in the George Crane Mine, a long way from Big Allen. Returning along the sloping passage, he relit his candle and turned left along the coffin level, but only for a few yards. The flame shrank, dwindled to a little jumping point of light, and went out. As a child he hadn’t noticed the bad air. He did now. There was a curious smell, like mingled coal gas and sulphur. Perhaps the water, not for a hundred years now pumped out of the levels, was combining with some chemical to produce a gas.
He turned back the way he had come, putting the candle in his pocket and relying once more on the torch. Once again he stopped to listen to the silence, a silence which his footfalls disturbed, and as he stood he was aware suddenly that he was happy. The depression of the day before, the feeling that nothing had been right for him since the day he found Marianne Price’s body, had faded away to be replaced by this deep, blissful contentment. He would have found it hard to say, even at the moment he began his descent, why he had wanted to go into the mines. For adventure? Just to see if it was the same? The answer should have been because he would be happy there, to find happiness. In the timeless, motionless subterranean silence he savoured his happiness. There came to him a curious idea that if somehow he could always stay down here he would never be unhappy or suffer or be humiliated again. The sigh he gave sounded as a roar in the silence.