Mercer took several breaths and stepped off the crumbling edge, hanging above the hundred-and-sixty-foot void. Gibby struggled for a moment, shifting his grip, so Mercer dropped a few quick inches. “You okay?” Mercer gasped, a sickly smile on his face.
“Yes, effendi,” Gibby grinned. “Your rope tangle makes you weigh just a little bit.”
The pulley system made it so Gibby was supporting only about fifty pounds of actual weight, but Mercer made sure the rope was still secured to the Land Cruiser’s winch. When the time came to haul him out, Gibby would need the power of the Toyota to pull him to safety.
“All right, lower away.”
Mercer dropped into a black world, the square of light over his head receding almost too fast. He switched on a six-cell flashlight and made certain his mining helmet was planted securely on his head. Bits of debris rained around him, pinging against the helmet and plunging down the vertical shaft. “Slower,” he yelled, bracing his feet against the irregular wall to give him just a little slack in the line. He gave two quick tugs to reinforce his verbal command, and his progress slowed dramatically.
Down he went, the makeshift bosun’s chair digging painfully into the back of his legs, the flashlight casting a white spot before his eyes. He trained it below his swaying perch, but the light could penetrate only a few feet. There should have been a steel guide rail bolted into the rock face to stabilize the skips and cages but there wasn’t, and Mercer could see no evidence that one had ever been installed. It made him wonder just how far the earlier attempt at digging out the diamonds had progressed.
There had been no evidence of a crushing mill or separation facilities at the surface camp. Since they hadn’t even installed a proper hoist system, it was possible the mine hadn’t been worked for very long. Yet a shaft this deep would have taken a year or more to dig, considering its age and the quality of equipment available a half century ago.
He came to the first drift roughly eighty feet down. This was a horizontal working passageway the miners had dug off the central shaft in order to tunnel into the mineral-laden ore. From this depth, the shaft’s surface opening appeared to be no larger than a storm drain. Mercer twisted himself across the open shaft until his boots landed firmly on the shelf that led off into the living rock. Whoever had opened the mine knew enough not to bore the main shaft straight into the volcanic vent, but rather sink a hole next to it and from there tunnel into the kimberlite ore. Mercer gave the signal for Gibby to hold the line where it was and unhooked himself from his sling, tying it to a wooden support beam so it wouldn’t dangle back over the void.
The flashlight cut into the gloom, revealing a long tunnel that was roughly twelve feet wide, six high, and God alone knew how long. Mercer played the light along the ceiling, surprised not to see any bats. In fact, he hadn’t noticed the guano smell so typical to abandoned mines. Like the Valley of Dead Children, the mine too was devoid of life. A chill ran up his spine that had nothing to do with the coolness of the subterranean passage.
He walked fifty yards down the drift before coming to the first cross cut, a right-angle passage roughly the same height as the drift by only half the width. For a moment Mercer considered taking this branch, but thought it better to keep to the main drive. Another cross cut appeared on his left after only a few more yards and then a third shortly after that. As he kept exploring, he again played the beam of the flashlight on the hanging wall — the ceiling, in mining parlance — and saw that bolts hadn’t been driven into it to help its stability. The rock was mostly rhyolite and probably didn’t need the bolts, but it deepened his concern. There was something very wrong about this mine.
He discovered a winze after two hundred yards, an open hole in the floor that dropped directly to the next level down. Such small vertical shafts connected two mining levels and frequently dumped into a haulage, a passage used for the removal of mined material. The wooden railing around the winze was dry and broken, and a descending ladder bolted to one side looked so weak it wouldn’t support a mouse, let alone a man. He continued on. By the time he reached the working face of the drift, fifteen hundred feet from the main shaft, he’d passed a total of eight cross cuts, two winzes, and a raise, an aperture in the hanging wall over his head that meant there was another level above him, one not directly joined to the principal shaft.
His original estimate of the size of the workings was way off the mark. Without exploring the cross cuts, he could only guess that they at least doubled the amount of mined tunnels from just this one drift. There was still a further hundred-foot drop to the bottom of the shaft, and there was no telling how many more drifts there were. Depending on the stability of the rock and the way in which the drifts were driven, there could be several more miles of tunnels shooting off the original bore.
Mercer spent fifteen minutes at the working face minutely examining the rocks. The ore from the last explosive shot hadn’t been cleared when the miners were pulled from the stopes, evidence that they had left in a hurry. Miners never, ever, left unprocessed ore in a mine. He sifted through the debris on the foot wall — the term for the floor — using brute strength to lever aside some of the larger chunks so he could scrutinize the rock face. No matter how he held his light, he could see no evidence of the opaque blue ground, the kimberlite, that would yield the diamonds. He figured about a year had been wasted here with nothing to show for it. This drift had been a bust, worthless.
Back at the main shaft, he tugged on the bosun’s chair, signaling Gibby, and slipped into the harness, cinching it tight around his legs and across his waist. He jerked twice more and stepped out into the void, spinning like a dervish as the rope took up the strain and unkinked itself. His descent was dizzying, but Mercer had done this before and felt no ill effects as Gibby lowered him farther into the earth.
He ignored the next three drifts, knowing he could explore them if necessary on his way back to the surface. As he expected, at the bottom of the shaft lay a twisted pile of machinery and hundreds of feet of braided steel cable. When the mine had been abandoned, the men working it had dumped their equipment into the hole rather than allow it to be taken by their enemies, probably the advancing English army. Mercer landed on a coil of hoist cable, the strands rusted together by Eritrea’s seasonal rains into a solid mass of metal that looked like a modern sculpture. Below it, his flashlight revealed the top of the cage used to haul men out of the mine, and farther into the tangled gear, he saw a large ore skip. He played the light across the debris and saw that the equipment had not actually fallen all the way to the bottom of the shaft; it had jammed together about fifteen feet from the ground. Shining the light around the perimeter walls of the mine’s sump, he jumped back dangerously when the beam flashed across a twisted corpse. It took several seconds for his heart to slow.
He picked his way across the pile of junk to get a closer look, the metal scraping against itself as his weight shifted its precarious balance. The body was in a similar state of decomposition as the Eritrean soldier he and Gibby had buried the day before, and his uniform looked about the same too. Mercer guessed that a curious soldier had stepped too close to the open pit, lost his footing, and plummeted to a quick death. Unhooking himself from the rope again, he signaled Gibby to hold his position — not that the lad would have much of a choice. With Mercer this deep, the line was at full stretch.
There were gaps between some of the equipment, a tangled warren of openings that Mercer could possibly edge his way through, gaining access to the mine’s deepest drift, whose entrance was buried by the abandoned mining gear. Yet even in the best circumstances, making the attempt was dangerous. The scrap could shift, crushing him or trapping him without any hope of rescue. If he became stuck, there wouldn’t be any way to signal Gibby, and even if he could, there wasn’t anything one person could do to set him free.