'He showed you a sample, did he?'
'Yes. And if that lode goes right down to the sixteen level, as he believes, you'd both of you be pretty rich men.'
He laughed. 'Father doesn't realise how much labour and machinery cost these days — that is, when you can get them. He's just on sixty-five, you know, and his brain's getting a little — well, he gets excited and he's not very realistic. It'd mean floating a company. The control would pass out of his hands. And he wouldn't stand for that. By the way, Pryce — he'll try to stop you from doing this job. I don't know just how he'll try, but he will. If he gets too troublesome, let me know. It'll mean a row. But I always get my own way in the end.' He said it with the hint of a chuckle, as though he got some devilish enjoyment out of rowing with his father. I thought of the two hundred and fifty pounds the elder Manack had offered me. And the face at the window watching us go down to the mine.
We were splashing through nearly six inches of water now. Occasionally I felt the outline of the cable through my gum boots.
The gallery was very quiet here. The distant sound of pumping was muffled and distorted so that it was like the steady beat of some giant's heart. Cripples' Ease seemed remote and far away. We were in a world of our own. We were rag worms burrowing under the sea. It ain't natural. That's what Friar had said. I'd never worked under the sea before. To keep my mind off the weight of water above our heads, I began thinking again of Cripples' Ease. The ghostly effect of the house fading away into the mist — that picture of it was indelibly imprinted on my mind. That and the little barred window. It all seemed so unreal. 'Has Cripples' Ease been in your family long?' I put the question to him more for something to say than out of any real curiosity.
'Father moved there in the early twenties,' he replied. 'I don't know much about it — I'd left by then. Some woman he'd taken up with gave it to him. Her father died and left it to her, together with a holding in Wheal Garth. You can see the name over the front door. James Nearne. He was landlord when the place was still a pub.' He caught my arm. 'Here we are,' he said. He bent his head so that his lamp lit the floor of the gallery. It dropped away into a great pit. Beyond the pit the gallery continued for perhaps ten feet and then stopped. In the blank wall at the end was fixed a great galvanised iron block round the wheel of which ran the cable we had been following.
There was water at the bottom of the pit. It lay like a still, black sheet some fifteen feet below us, its surface rippled by falling drops. Scaffolding spanned the hole and was built up into a shaft cut vertically in the roof of the gallery. Ladders climbed the scaffolding and disappeared in the black funnel of the shaft. 'We've cleared about ten feet of that shaft by blasting,' Manack told me. 'I reckon there's about another fifteen feet to go. Didn't dare go on without an expert. After each blow we cleared the rock. In the final blow I'm banking on all the loose rock falling down there.'
He indicated the pit.
'The weight of the water may carry rock into the gallery,' I said. 'I wouldn't like to say what'd happen when the sea breaks in here.'
'I've thought of that,' he said. 'My idea is this. You work up as near to the sea as you can. When you daren't go any farther, you fix your main explosives in watertight cartridges. Then you run a long drill through, put a small charge in and let the sea seep into the Mermaid. When the whole gallery is filled right up, then we blow the main charges by electric detonators. Okay?'
'Suppose the entrance gets jammed by rock?'
'Then I'll go down in a diving suit. Don't worry about it. That'll be my problem. What you've got to do is get to work on that shaft there. And remember, the sooner you get the job done, the sooner you'll be safe aboard the Arisaig. You take a look round now. I'm going back to the main shaft to see how Friar's getting on. I must remind him to get those compressed air cylinders up to the store room. I'll be back inside half an hour. Then maybe you'll be able to tell me how long the job is going to take and what your plan of operation is.'
'All right,' I said. 'I'll have a look round.' I watched his lamp bobbing along the gallery. It was surprising how straight that Mermaid gallery was. The levels of most Cornish mines twist and turn as they.follow the sea. It was only later that I learned that the Mermaid was a development gallery. They had been looking for just what Manack had found.
As the glimmer of Captain Manack's lamp faded to a far-off pinpoint of light, I became very conscious of the sound of water all round me. The regular heart-beats of the pump were just a faint throb — a sound so slight that it might have been the pressure of blood in my ears. Dominating everything — the only definite sound — was the sound of the water. It trickled, it gurgled, it went plop, plop, plop in the pool at the bottom of the pit. I suppose it drained through to the lower levels, for there wasn't any more than a few inches on the gallery floor, and it had to go somewhere. I thought of all those levels, sixteen of them, thrusting out under the sea. And this was the top. The roof of the Mermaid gallery was the bed of the sea. It bore the whole weight of the water.
It felt chill and dank. The trouble was I didn't yet feel at home in the mine. It was different to any I'd been in before. And when things are different, that's when a miner worries. Whilst I had been standing there listening to the sounds of the water, the light of Manack's lamp had disappeared altogether. He must have reached the end of the gallery and turned up to the adit. I swung myself on to the ladders and climbed the scaffolding.
The shaft they had blasted was roughly circular and about ten feet in diameter. It coincided with the pit in the floor of the gallery. The ledges on which the carriage wheels would run must be a good eight feet apart. That gave plenty of room for the rubble from the breach in the sea bed to fall straight into the pit. I climbed until I reached the end of the shaft. For amateurs they'd done a pretty neat job. They'd kept the shape of the shaft, though it was a bit ragged at the edges. I felt the rock above my head. It was wet and in the light of my lamp I saw what looked like a shrimp scuttle into a crevice. The sides of the shaft streamed with water. I wondered whether Manack's calculations were right. The rock had a peculiar feel about it, as though it was part of the sea bed. It wasn't that it was soft, and yet that's the way it felt. It was granite all right, with streaks of basalt. But the surface of it was slimed over.
I climbed down and had a look at the pit. There was a ladder running down into it. As I peered down a change in the rock caught my eye. There were some tools on the lower platform of the scaffolding. I went down into the pit with a hammer and a cold chisel. It was about fifteen feet down to the water. The rock formation that had attracted my attention was across the other side. I put my gum boot down into the water. It was only a foot deep. I waded across.
Sudden excitement surged through me as I examined that dull rock. I got to work with hammer and chisel. All other thoughts were swept from my mind. I knew I was not making any discovery. The elder Manack had found it first. But God, if you've ever been a tinner — to chisel out almost solid ore like that!
After about a quarter of an hour's work I was streaming with sweat and my blood was thudding through my veins, for the air was not good down there. But I didn't care. I held in my hand a piece of mother tin about the size of my fist. And I had chiselled it out myself. I cleaned it on the sleeve of my overalls and peered at it, turning the jet of my lamp full on in order to see it better. Gold or tin — what did it matter? The ore content was such that the man who worked the seam couldn't help but become rich. If this were Australia now, I could have staked out a claim somewhere near Manack's. I stood there dreaming with the ore in my hand until a voice suddenly said, 'So you have found the lode, eh?'