by Damon Knight
After a few hundred paces he came to a major cross-tunnel, off which ran many short leads and some large rooms or stopes. He turned left, and presently passed a big stope in three levels. He entered it. The farthest level was only about five feet under the roof, which was still well timbered with posts and beams. In a corner of the backmost level, behind an angle of quartz intrusion which the miners had left jutting out as a supporting buttress, he made his new camp, setting out the food, water, tinderbox, and candles where they would come under his hand easily in the dark, and laying the cloak as a mattress on the floor, which was of a rubbly, hard clay. Then he put out the candle, already burned down by a quarter of its length, and lay down in the dark.
After his third return to that first side tunnel, finding no sign that Bord had come there, he went back to his camp and studied his provisions. There were still two loaves of bread, half a bottle of water, and the salt meat, which he had not yet touched; and four candles. He guessed that it might have been six days since Bord had come, but it might have been three, or eight. He was thirsty, but dared not drink, so long as he had no other supply.
He set off to find water.
At first he counted his paces. After a hundred and twenty he saw that the timbering of the tunnel was askew, and there were places where the rubble fill had broken through, half filling the passage. He came to a winze, a vertical shaft, easy to scramble down by what remained of the wooden ladder, but after it, in the lower level, he forgot to count his steps. Once he passed a broken pick handle; farther on he saw a miner’s discarded headband, a stump of candle still stuck in the forehead socket. He dropped this into the pocket of his coat and went on.
The monotony of the walls of hewn stone and planking dulled his mind. He walked on like one who will walk forever. Darkness followed him and went ahead of him.
His candle burning short spilled a stream of hot tallow on his fingers, hurting him. He dropped the candle, and it went out.
He groped for it in the sudden dark, sickened by the reek of its smoke, lifting his head to avoid that stink of burning. Before him, straight before him, far away, he saw the stars.
Tiny, bright, remote, caught in a narrow opening like the slot in the observatory dome: an oblong full of stars in blackness.
He got up, forgetting about the candle, and began to run toward the stars.
They moved, dancing, like the stars in the telescope field when the clockwork mechanism shuddered or when his eyes were very tired. They danced and brightened.
He came among them, and they spoke to him.
The flames cast queer shadows on the blackened faces and brought queer lights out of the bright, living eyes.
“Here, then, who’s that? Hanno?”
“What were you doing up that old drift, mate?”
“Hey, who is that?”
“Who the devil, stop him—”
“Hey, mate! Hold on!”
He ran blind into the dark, back the way he had come. The lights followed him and he chased his own faint, huge shadow down the tunnel. When the shadow was swallowed by the old dark and the old silence came again he still stumbled on, stooping and groping so that he was oftenest on all fours or on his feet and one hand. At last he dropped down and lay huddled against the wall, his chest full of fire.
Silence, dark.
He found the candle end in the tin holder in his pocket, lighted it with the flint and steel, and by its glow found the vertical shaft not fifty feet from where he had stopped. He made his way back up to his camp. There he slept; woke and ate, and drank the last of his water; meant to get up and go seeking water again; fell asleep, or into a doze or daze, in which he dreamed of a voice speaking to him.
“There you are. All right. Don’t startle. I’ll do you no harm. I said it wasn’t no knocker. Who ever heard of a knocker as tall as a man? Or who ever seen one, for that matter. They’re what you don’t see, mates, I said. And what we did see was a man, count on it. So what’s he doing in the mine, said they, and what if he’s a ghost, one of the lads that was caught when the house of water broke in the old south adit, maybe, come walking? Well, then, I said, I’ll go see that. I never seen a ghost yet, for all I heard of them. I don’t care to see what’s not meant to be seen, like the knocker folk, but what harm to see Temon’s face again, or old Trip, haven’t I seen ’em in dreams, just the same, in the ends, working away with their faces sweating same as life? Why not? So I come along. But you’re no ghost, nor miner. A deserter you might be, or a thief. Or are you out of your wits, is that it, poor man? Don’t fear. Hide if you like. What’s it to me? There’s room down here for you and me. Why are you hiding from the light of the sun?”
“The soldiers . . .”
“I thought so.”
When the miner nodded, the candle bound to his forehead set light leaping over the roof of the stope. He squatted about ten feet from Guennar, his hands hanging between his knees. A bunch of candles and his pick, a short-handled, finely shaped tool, hung from his belt. His face and body, beneath the restless star of the candle, were rough shadows, earth-colored.
“Let me stay here.”
“Stay and welcome! Do I own the mine? Where did you come in, eh, the old drift above the river? That was luck to find that, and luck you turned this way in the crosscut, and didn’t go east instead. Eastward this level goes on to the caves. There’s great caves there; did you know it? Nobody knows but the miners. They opened up the caves before I was born, following the old lode that lay along here sunward. I seen the caves once, my dad took me, you should see this once, he says. See the world underneath the world. A room there was no end to. A cavern as deep as the sky, and a black stream falling into it, falling and falling till the light of the candle failed and couldn’t follow it, and still the water was falling on down into the pit. The sound of it came up like a whisper without an end, out of the dark. And on beyond that there’s other caves, and below. No end to them, maybe. Who knows? Cave under cave, and glittering with the barren crystal. It’s all barren stone there. And all worked out here, years ago. It’s a safe enough hole you chose, mate, if you hadn’t come stumbling in on us. What was you after? Food? A human face?”
“Water.”
“No lack of that. Come on, I’ll show you. Beneath here in the lower level there’s all too many springs. You turned the wrong direction. I used to work down there, with the damned cold water up to my knees, before the vein ran out. A long time ago. Come on.”
The old miner left him in his camp, after showing him where the spring rose and warning him not to follow down the watercourse, for the timbering would be rotted and a step or sound might bring the earth down. Down there all the timbers were covered with a deep glittering white fur: saltpeter perhaps, or a fungus; it was very strange, above the oily water. When he was alone again Guennar thought he had dreamed that white tunnel full of black water, and the visit of the miner. When he saw a flicker of light far down the tunnel, he crouched behind the quartz buttress with a great wedge of granite in his hand: for all his fear and anger and grief had come down to one thing here in the darkness, a determination that no man would lay hand on him. A blind determination, blunt and heavy as a broken stone, heavy in his soul.
It was only the old man coming, with a hunk of dry cheese for him.
He sat with the astronomer, and talked. Guennar ate up the cheese, for he had no food left, and listened to the old man talk. As he listened the weight seemed to lift a little, he seemed to see a little farther in the dark.
“You’re no common soldier,” the miner said, and he replied, “No, I was a student once,” but no more, because he dared not tell the miner who he was. The old man knew all the events of the region; he spoke of the burning of the “Round House” on the hill, and of Count Bord. “He went off to the city with them, with these black-gowns, to be tried, they do say, to come before their council. Tried for what? what did he ever do but hunt boar and deer and foxen? is it the council of the foxen trying him? What’s it
all about, this snooping and soldiering and burning and trying? Better leave honest folk alone. The count was honest, as far as the rich can be, a fair landlord. But you can’t trust them, none of such folk. Only down here. You can trust the men who go down into the mine. What else has a man got down here but his own hands and his mates’ hands? What’s between him and death, when there’s a fall in the level or a winze closes and he’s in the blind end, but their hands, and their shovels, and their will to dig him out? There’d be no silver up there in the sun if there wasn’t trust between us down here in the dark. Down here you can count on your mates. And nobody comes but them. Can you see the owner in his lace, or the soldiers, coming down the ladders, coming down and down the great shaft into the dark? Not them! They’re brave at tramping on the grass, but what good’s a sword and shouting in the dark? I’d like to see ’em come down here . . .”
The next time he came another man was with him, and they brought an oil lamp and a clay jar of oil, as well as more cheese, bread, and some apples. “It was Hanno thought of the lamp,” the old man said. “A hempen wick it is, if she goes out blow sharp and she’ll likely catch up again. Here’s a dozen candles, too. Young Per swiped the lot from the doler, up on the grass.”
“They all know I’m here?”
“We do,” the miner said briefly. “They don’t.”
Some time after this, Guennar returned along the lower, westleading level he had followed before, till he saw the miners’ candles dance like stars; and he came into the stope where they were working. They shared their meal with him. They showed him the ways of the mine, and the pumps, and the great shaft where the ladders were and the hanging pulleys with their buckets; he sheered off from that, for the wind that came sucking down the great shaft smelled to him of burning. They took him back and let him work with them. They treated him as a guest, as a child. They had adopted him. He was their secret.
There is not much good spending twelve hours a day in a black hole in the ground all your life long if there’s nothing there, no secret, no treasure, nothing hidden.
There was the silver, to be sure. But where ten crews of fifteen had used to work these levels and there had been no end to the groan and clatter and crash of the loaded buckets going up on the screaming winch and the empties banging down to meet the trammers running with their heavy carts, now one crew of eight men worked: men over forty, old men, who had no skill but mining. There was still some silver there in the hard granite, in little veins among the gangue. Sometimes they would lengthen an end by one foot in two weeks.
“It was a great mine,” they said with pride.
They showed the astronomer how to set a gad and swing the sledge, how to go at granite with the finely balanced and sharp-pointed pick, how to sort and “cob,” what to look for, the rare bright branchings of the pure metal, the crumbling rich rock of the ore. He helped them daily. He was in the stope waiting for them when they came, and spelled one or another on and off all day with the shovel work, or sharpening tools, or running the ore cart down its grooved plank to the great shaft, or working in the ends. There they would not let him work long; pride and habit forbade it. “Here, leave off chopping at that like a woodcutter. Look, this way: see?” But then another would ask him, “Give me a blow here, lad, see, on the gad, that’s it.”
They fed him from their own coarse meager meals.
In the night, alone in the hollow earth, when they had climbed the long ladders up “to grass” as they said, he lay and thought of them, their faces, their voices, their heavy, scarred, earth-stained hands, old men’s hands with thick nails blackened by bruising rock and steel; those hands, intelligent and vulnerable, which had opened up the earth and found the shining silver in the solid rock. The silver they never held, never kept, never spent. The silver that was not theirs.
“If you found a new vein, a new lode, what would you do?”
“Open her, and tell the masters.”
“Why tell the masters?”
“Why, man! we gets paid for what we brings up! D’you think we does this damned work for love?”
“Yes.”
They all laughed at him, loud, jeering laughter, innocent. The living eyes shone in their faces blackened with dust and sweat.
“Ah, if we could find a new lode! The wife would keep a pig like we had once, and by God I’d swim in beer! But if there’s silver they’d have found it; that’s why they pushed the workings so far east. But it’s barren there, and worked out here, that’s the short and long of it.”
Time stretched behind him and ahead of him like the dark drifts and crosscuts of the mine, all present at once, wherever he with his small candle might be among them. When he was alone now the astronomer often wandered in the tunnels and the old stopes, knowing the dangerous places, the deep levels full of water, adept at shaky ladders and tight places, intrigued by the play of his candle on the rock walls and faces, the glitter of mica that seemed to come from deep inside the stone. Why did it sometimes shine out that way? as if the candle found something far within the shining broken surface, something that winked in answer and occulted, as if it had slipped behind a cloud or an unseen planet’s disk.
“There are stars in the earth,” he thought. “If one knew how to see them.”
Awkward with the pick, he was clever with machinery; they admired his skill, and brought him tools. He repaired pumps and windlasses; he fixed up a lamp on a chain for “young Per” working in a long narrow dead-end, with a reflector made from a tin candle holder beaten out into a curved sheet and polished with fine rock-dust and the sheepskin lining of his coat. “It’s a marvel,” Per said. “Like daylight. Only, being behind me, it don’t go out when the air gets bad, and tell me I should be backing out for a breath.”
For a man can go on working in a narrow end for some time after his candle has gone out for lack of oxygen.
“You should have a bellows rigged there.”
“What, like I was a forge?”
“Why not?”
“Do ye ever go up to the grass, nights?” asked Hanno, looking wistfully at Guennar. Hanno was a melancholy, thoughtful, softhearted fellow. “Just to look about you?”
Guennar did not answer. He went off to help Bran with a timbering job; the miners did all the work that had once been done by crews of timberers, trammers, sorters, and so on.
“He’s deathly afraid to leave the mine,” Per said, low.
“Just to see the stars and get a breath of the wind,” Hanno said, as if he was still speaking to Guennar.
One night the astronomer emptied out his pockets and looked at the stuff that had been in them since the night of the burning of the observatory: things he had picked up in those hours which he now could not remember, those hours when he had groped and stumbled in the smoldering wreckage, seeking . . . seeking what he had lost … he no longer thought of what he had lost. It was sealed off in his mind by a thick scar, a burn scar. For a long time this scar in his mind kept him from understanding the nature of the objects now ranged before him on the dusty stone floor of the mine: a wad of papers scorched all along one side; a round piece of glass or crystal; a metal tube; a beautifully worked wooden cogwheel; a bit of twisted blackened copper etched with fine lines; and so on, bits, wrecks, scraps. He put the papers back into his pocket, without trying to separate the brittle half-fused leaves and make out the fine script. He continued to look at and occasionally pick up and examine the other things, especially the piece of glass.
This he knew to be the eyepiece of his ten-inch telescope. He had ground the lens himself. When he picked it up he handled it delicately, by the edges, lest the acid of his skin etch the glass. Finally he began to polish it clean, using a wisp of fine lamb’s wool from his coat. When it was clear, he held it up and looked at and through it at all angles. His face was calm and intent, his light wide-set eyes steady.
Tilted in his fingers, the telescope lens reflected the lamp flame in one bright tiny point near the edge and seemingly
beneath the curve of the face, as if the lens had kept a star in it from the many hundred nights it had been turned toward the sky.
He wrapped it carefully in the wisp of wool and made a place for it in the rock niche with his tinderbox. Then he took up the other things one by one.
During the next weeks the miners saw their fugitive less often while they worked. He was off a great deal by himself: exploring the deserted eastern regions of the mine, he said, when they asked him what he did.
“What for?”
“Prospecting,” he said with the brief, wincing smile that gave him a very crazy look.
“Oh, lad, what do you know about that? She’s all barren there. The silver’s gone; and they found no eastern lode. You might be finding a bit of poor ore or a vein of tinstone, but nothing worth the digging.”
“How do you know what’s in the earth, in the rock under your feet, Per?”
“I know the signs, lad. Who should know better?”
“But if the signs are hidden?”
“Then the silver’s hidden.”
“Yet you know it is there, if you knew where to dig, if you could see into the rock. And what else is there? You find the metal, because you seek it, and dig for it. But what else might you find, deeper than the mine, if you sought, if you knew where to dig?”
“Rock,” said Per. “Rock, and rock, and rock.”
“And then?”
“And then? Hellfire, for all I know. Why else does it get hotter as the shafts go deeper? That’s what they say. Getting nearer hell.”
“No,” the astronomer said, clear and firm. “No. There is no hell beneath the rocks.”