by RA Williams
‘And?’
‘It is deep.’
‘How deep?’
‘As I recall, the line found bottom just short of two hundred and forty metres.’
Converting the depth to imperial measurements in her head, she smiled. ‘I’ll be damned.’
‘What is it?’
She took a breath, saying to herself, ‘Sometimes you gotta step outside the tornado.’ She looked up at him. ‘Seven hundred and eighty feet.’
‘Is correct, I think. Why?’
She laughed. ‘Because, Herr Dietrich, I’m an idiot.’ She stood looking along the lake. ‘In the seventeenth century, British measurement was conducted in fathoms. Much like nautical depth today.’ Opening her bag, she held up the journal of William Harvey Folcanstan.
‘At the foot of a strange tor, I did descend one hundred and thirty fathoms into the Pit of Hel.’ Turning to him, she repeated, ‘One hundred and thirty fathoms.’
Her foreman said nothing.
‘It’s seven hundred and eighty feet. It’s at the bottom of the lake, Herr Dietrich. Lake Wiembecke is the Pit of Hel.’
‘Mein Gott.’
‘We have to drain the lake.’
‘Was?’
‘The mine is under the lake. If we want to get at it, we must drain it,’ she repeated.
‘Do you have any idea how many litres of water would need to be transferred? It’s impossible. Where would we transfer it to?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we can transfer it to that giant hole we’ve just spent the last seven months digging and you now want to fill in.’
‘Lake Wiembecke is a part of the spiritual heart of the Externsteine. It cannot simply be drained.’
Slinging her bag onto her back, she replied with a confident smile, ‘Fortunately, I don’t require your permission.’
She headed back to the Lager to fetch some dry clothes. Dietrich did not cease his protestations until they heard shouts from the bottom of the dig. Approaching its rim, they peered below. Excited labourers waved back.
‘They have finally found something,’ Dietrich almost shouted with delight.
Hurrying down the switchbacks, her wet feet squishing in her boots as she ran, Elle reached the foot of the pit before wading through labourers leaning on their shovels. As the last man moved aside, she saw what they had unearthed.
‘It is a trench line,’ Dietrich said, his voice suddenly quieter.
Elle turned to him.
‘I was wounded at the Dritte Flandernschlacht,’ he told her.
‘In the Great War?’
He nodded. ‘The Third Battle of Ypres. I hoped never to see a trench again.’
She stared down the trench’s length. Several labourers dawdled, resting on their spades.
‘Clear outta there, fellas,’ Elle said. ‘Lassen Sie mich bitte vorbei.’
Now cleared of men, the trench revealed itself fully.
‘Scheiße,’ she cursed. ‘Dietrich, give me a gasper.’
She put the cigarette to her lips as her foreman held up a light.
‘Is it the mine?’
Staring through the cigarette’s pale blue smoke at the parallel gouges in the rock floor, she could hardly suppress her excitement. Something heavy had been dragged along the trench a long time ago.
‘No,’ she said, taking a fresh, deep drag. ‘Something better.’
Leaping down into the trench, she followed the gouges as they descended towards the tors. The trench came to an end. As did the peculiar grooves.
Dietrich glared at her. ‘What is it you do not tell me, Dr Annenberg?’
Wiping away the water dripping from her hair, she stared at the gouges’ end, her mind trying to work it out.
‘After all this time, you do not have trust in me?’ he asked her.
‘It’s not a matter of trust,’ she replied. Removing the trowel she kept tucked in her back pocket, she crouched down, gently shifting the soil at her feet. ‘I just wouldn’t want you to presume I was mad.’
The trowel clinked against something. She tapped it. Bare rock. Sandstone, like the tors.
With her hand, she uncovered a heap of sharp-edged fragments, tossing one no bigger than a softball out of the trench to Dietrich’s feet. Sifting around in the loose soil, she found more of different shapes and sizes, all similarly sharp-edged.
‘What have you found?’ he asked.
Holding up a shard, she blew the dirt from it.
‘Scree.’
Dietrich knelt, picking up the fragment. ‘There are a lot of these fragments around here. It is just the spoil, when solid rock was cut into.’
‘We have yet to find any rock cuttings this distance from the tors.’ Digging into the loose soil at her feet, it took mere seconds for her to expose the sharp edge of solid rock. ‘But we have now.’ Brushing the dirt away revealed a step. Removing more soil revealed another.
‘The trench does not stop?’ Dietrich asked.
‘This isn’t a trench.’
‘What then?’
She looked to the tors towering above them. ‘It’s a way in.’
‘Wunderbar,’ he exclaimed, his grin almost viperish.
‘Let us not send word to Berlin yet.’
‘But this is monumental,’ Dietrich said.
‘We don’t know what this is.’
Tucking her trowel away, she reached for the spade lying on the ground above her. She pushed the spade’s head into the hard pack with her boot, prising out a clump of soil.
‘Okay, Dietrich,’ she said, tossing the loosened dirt over her shoulder. ‘Get the boys back down here. We need to clear this out.’ Returning to the step, she pushed the spade into the earth again.
‘It is not correct for the dig director to work alongside labourers,’ protested Dietrich.
‘Oh, is that right?’ she said, and threw a spadeful of soil onto his boots. ‘Roll up your sleeves and get down here.’
Elle emerged sweaty and sticky from being confined in the subterranean passage with the labourers for hours. Inhaling a lungful of dusk’s fresh air, she filled a tin cup from a water butt, pouring its contents over her head and neck, her sweat-stained work shirt covered in earth. Looking along the trench, flickering oil lamps showing the way below, she slowly removed her work gloves and clenched her aching fingers, the blisters on her palms bleeding after a day of digging.
A cold bottle touched the back of her neck. Craning her neck, she could not help but smile, wanting to wrap herself round the bottles of Vernors ginger ale Dietrich held in his hands.
‘Brought out the good stuff?’ she teased, gratefully accepting one. Putting the bottle against one edge of an upturned wheelbarrow, she thumped it with her fist. The bottle cap spun away.
She handed it to her foreman and repeated the action with the other.
‘How did you get your hands on these?’ she asked, holding it as if it were some kind of treasure in itself. Bottled in Detroit, it was a friendly reminder of home so far away.
‘I have a contact in France who travels often to the States. He brings back cases for medicinal purposes. It is the most powerful of ginger ales, ja? Another American extravagance in which I occasionally partake.’
Pressing the cold glass against the back of her neck again, she sighed with satisfaction before taking a long drink. It was the most refreshingly effervescent, yet sharp-tasting thing she’d had in months. ‘That’s all kinds of all right.’
In Germany, beer practically flowed from water taps, but Vernors was a true luxury. She raised her bottle. ‘I salute your bravura, Herr Dietrich.’
‘And I yours, Dr Annenberg. Americans…’ he said, before drinking. ‘It’s amazing what your countrymen can do.’
‘Ice-cold, as well.’
‘The Feldkoch fetched a block of ice from Bad Meinberg today,’ said Dietrich.
‘The village is five kilometres from here. You sent the cook in a pony and trap all that way just for ice?’
He shrugg
ed.
Elle knew it wasn’t true. Dietrich was sending word to Berlin, and this was him just buttering her up. She didn’t let on – there was sometimes more power in withholding knowledge.
‘How did you know about the entrance down there?’
‘A hunch.’
‘Was ist ein “hunch”?’
‘A guess,’ she explained. ‘My Aunt Anna brought me here a bunch when I was a kid. One morning, I ditched my cousins while they were having their morning swim and climbed one of the fissures in the tors.’
She looked up from the pit towards the darkening towers.
‘It was verboten, of course, but that made it all the more fun for a curious eleven-year-old. I found a tiny blocked-off altar chamber and managed to squeeze into it through a little hole, just as a single ray of morning sun pierced the darkness. It fell upon a fiend chiselled onto the side of an empty sarcophagus. The Germanic god Hel.’
Turning to him, she continued, ‘That was it. I was hooked. I wanted to know what I didn’t understand. I’ve spent my career trying to know what I didn’t understand. There was just something about that sarcophagus in that tiny chamber within the tor. It seemed like a red herring.’
‘A red herring?’
‘A distraction,’ she said, and smiled. ‘Everyone looks for clues in the tors. Maybe the answers are beneath it.’
Dietrich looked to the jagged rock towers. ‘What shall we do now?’
She looked back at the entrance of the passageway. Twelve steps led to an impassable dead end. ‘How long have you been the acting foreman at this site?’
‘Seven months with you. Before that, I was here for perhaps two years with Herr Doktor Wirth. Another four years with other expeditions. I regard myself as something of an expert on the Externsteine.’
‘An expert on the Externsteine.’ Germany was full of experts.
‘Witch stones,’ he replied. ‘This place is important in Germanic folklore. A mountain hollow is a place of pagan worship by early Teutonic tribes.’
‘Teutonic tribes fleeing Carpathia.’
‘A German flees no one.’
She looked at him. ‘A couple million doughboys would disagree with you.’ She watched his brow furrow. Before he could reply, she threw him a bone. ‘This tribe fled from Wilderzeichen.’
‘Wilderzeichen? This is nothing but old Saxon gibberish.’
‘Wild signs were omens of a coming revenant,’ said Elle.
‘Revenant? Like a witch?’ he asked.
‘Not really a witch. More like a banshee anthropophagus.’
‘Eater of human flesh?’
Elle nodded. ‘I think whatever these Teuton tribes fled from, followed them here.’
‘Mystical hogwash,’ he said, dismissing the idea. ‘Germans depend on science, not folklore. The Externsteine is an important place for National Socialists.’
‘Science, it’s a helluva thing, isn’t it?’ She winked. ‘When the facts don’t fit the science, make the science fit the facts.’ She did so find pleasure in keeping the little Nazi and his nationalistic bilge in check.
Before he could reply, the labourers appeared from the passage. The day’s work at its end, they filed along the trench and out the shallow end, singing.
‘Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein.’
Elle liked the song. A flower blooming on a heath. The flower, a girl named Erika. Probably she was a large German countrywoman with huge bosoms. The men were happy to have discovered something at long last, after so many months of work. Happy to have work. Happy the day was done.
They began the arduous climb up the switchbacks, and when they reached the top, they would march to the upper pond for their evening ablutions.
‘What now?’ asked Dietrich again.
‘Sekr.’
‘The runes we have discovered chiselled above the blockade? What does it mean?’
She nodded. ‘It means ‘“Guilty”.’
‘Guilty of what?’
‘Good question,’ she replied thoughtfully, her mind on the end of the passage they had uncovered, and the runes chiselled above the massive solid rock blockade. No amount of digging would get round it.
‘You have any gelignite?’ she asked.
‘In the stores. Left behind from Herr Doktor Wirth’s expedition.’
‘Let’s wire that blockade and blow it.’
Dietrich stood, smiling. Clearly, the idea of blowing something up excited him. Putting down his empty Vernors bottle, he went to fetch the explosives.
‘Dietrich?’
He turned.
‘This is science. Not politics. Do me a favour and don’t organise a parade yet.’
He nodded his reply, and was gone.
Draining her own Vernors bottle now, Elle noticed how dirty her hands were. She had toiled alongside the labourers all day, and her wet clothes and hair were matted with dirt. Climbing from the pit, she returned to the Reichsarbeitsdienst Lager for a wash before the evening meal.
Germans fancied giving the most mundane of things grandiose names. Even the man who picked up the horse crap after a parade had an impressive title in the Third Reich: Scheißhaufen Kommando. The Lager, set in a grove of pines and birches, was nothing more than a bunch of mildewy canvas tents, interspersed with battered wooden tables and benches where the labour corps took their meals alfresco.
Elle’s Lager was separated from the workers’ encampment by a copse of trees, giving her a modicum of privacy. Winding the gramophone outside her tent, she lowered the needle on a quarter-inch Diamond Disc she’d brought from the States. ‘Gold Digger Stomp’ by the Goldkette Orchestra warbled from the tired speaker. Despite Hitler labelling Harlem swing vile, the Germans were secretly mad on it.
Beside her tent stood a small water butt. Lifting its lid, she found a melting block of ice floating in it, left for her by the kitchen staff.
‘God bless you, Dietrich,’ she said, dipping a pitcher into the butt and pouring cold water into an enamel basin before stripping bare and washing as best she could, in lieu of the proper bath she really needed.
Changing into clean dungarees and a checked cotton shirt, she sat down heavily on her bunk. The old tennis balls fell from her rucksack, and she picked them up. She had long since forgotten which one had floated up to her when Titanic broke apart, and which was left by her late-night visitants.
She gazed idly out of the tent flap, a summer moon shining brightly through the branches of the tall pines. She looked at the dirty Detroit Tigers baseball cap sitting on her bunk and thought about Michigan in summer, with crickets chirping through the balmy evenings. She missed home.
A motor car approached. Standing, she pushed the tent flap back further. Headlamps bore down upon her. A Kübelwagen – a dark grey, tin-can Volkswagen, open-topped with stamped metal sides. To her surprise, Dr Mauss sat in the back seat. He waved as the car creaked to a halt.
Returning his wave, Elle pulled on her cap and went to greet him. ‘I must be close,’ she said with a smile, as the driver, a fresh-faced young man in uniform, helped Mauss out. She had not seen him for a year. In that time, he had aged significantly, and was hunched over, walking with the aid of a stick.
‘I must be very close for you to come out of your library.’
Mauss thanked the driver, who crunched the Kübelwagen into gear and drove towards the workers’ encampment.
‘Bonjour, Eleanor,’ he said, doffing his Panama hat before kissing her on both cheeks, his warmth and decency in stark, welcome contrast to the cold precision of Germany, where even a compliment sounded like verbal stabbing. ‘I bring you a delicious summer wine from the Languedoc.’ He raised the bottle he carried in his other hand. ‘Afraid it’s étouffant. I’ve been on the train all day.’
Taking it from him, she opened the ice barrel and tossed it inside. ‘Ice, I got. Chesterfields, I don’t.’
Reaching into the pocket of his summer suit, he retrieved a packet of American cigarettes. ‘I rememb
ered.’
Almost snatching them from his hands in eagerness, she tore open the pack, giving a cigarette a good sniff. She hadn’t had any decent tobacco for ages. Dr Mauss clicked his lighter for her, and she inhaled gratefully, the Chesterfields working their magic.
She welcomed him to sit in the folding campaign chair she had taken with her in the field for twenty years. Struggling to lower himself into it, he removed a polka-dot handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mopped his brow.
‘I never once imagined Germany to be so hot.’
‘They call it Führer weather,’ said Elle.
‘Does Herr Hitler enjoy sunbathing?’
She sat on a wooden bench across from him, wafting away the smoke from the small campfire she kept alight to ward off mosquitoes, before putting up her feet. ‘Whenever the sun’s out, the National Socialists organise ballyhoos.’
Mauss looked at her feet. ‘You look nearly like a member of the hard-working Volk. Except, of course, for your cap. Unmistakably American. Less formal out here in the provinces than Berlin, are we?’
She didn’t disagree. ‘Have a look around, Dr Mauss. What do you see?’
‘I see trees and tors.’
‘What do you not see?’
‘Nazis.’ He laughed at her playful pun. ‘Just because there are no swastikas and goose-stepping, do not think for a moment that they are not here.’ He eyed the water butt where Elle had left the bottle minutes before. ‘Might we uncork that wine? It’s been a long day’s travel and I’m ever so parched.’
Retrieving a corkscrew from her tent, Elle took the bottle from the ice barrel. It was very slightly chilled. The cork popped easily, and she poured wine into two grubby enamel cups, offering one to him before sitting down.
‘We’re three hundred kilometres from Berlin,’ she said. ‘There’s no Nazi pedantry out here.’
‘The Nazis have a flair for the dramatic, do they not?’
‘When I first got here, I made the mistake of agreeing to free labour from the local Hitler Youth battalion.’ She took a gulp of wine. With hints of apple and fig, it was delightful. ‘Useless malingerers. Sitting about listening to high-pitched squeals from that blatherskite with the ridiculous moustache on the wireless. All they were good for was goose-stepping and singing nationalistic songs. After a week, I sent ’em back to their commanding officer. I need less Sieg-Heiling and more digging. I won’t have politics here. Just science.’