The Golden Soak (14 page)

I counted 217 paces before the adit opened out into a man-made cavern with a gaping hole in the floor and timber supports for the hoist. A bucket hung there on rusted wires that ran over a pulley and down to, the drum of a coal-burning steam engine with its chimney running up into the roof. It was all very primitive and entirely derelict.

Prophecy shone the torch down into the shaft, the two of us hanging on to the baulks of timber and peering into the depths. The shaft went straight down, a rope ladder falling to the staging of the first level, then wooden ladders continuing on down to what looked like the gleam of water at the bottom. Nothing seemed to have changed since the mine had been abandoned, except for that rope ladder secured to one of the timbers of the hoist. The other ladders seemed all right. It was only this first section that had gone and I wondered about that as Prophecy began to pull the rope ladder up. ‘Seems sound enough,' she said. ‘Home-made, by the look of it.'

The ladder was formed of two lengths of rope, knotted at intervals to support the slats of wood that formed the rungs. The rope was old, but it was good thick manilla and it wasn't frayed or rotted. The slats, too, were sound, though they were of several types of wood. It looked as though it had been made on the station and I was thinking of Ed Garrety going down alone as I lowered it back into the shaft.

‘Yuh'd better tie the nylon round you just in case.'

I could feel the tension growing in me as I put on the helmet and buckled the belt around my waist, easing the lead from the battery up to the back of my neck and switching it on to test. The light from the reflector on my helmet was bright on the rock walls. ‘Battery all right?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘One thing Nobby taught me. I always keep it charged.' She handed me the end of the nylon rope and I tied it round my chest under the armpits. She had already passed the coil round one of the wooden timbers. She knew what she had to do and I slipped the haversack on and tucked the geological hammer into my belt. ‘I'll be two or three hours at least,' I said. ‘But I'll call to you up the shaft. If a whole hour goes by without my calling, then you'd better go for help.'

She nodded, and I ducked under the timbering and lowered myself into the blackness of the hole, feeling with my feet until I had found the first of the slats. I saw the ropes take the strain as my full weight came on the ladder, then I was moving cautiously down it, my face close to the rock and Prophecy paying out the nylon safety rope from above. The ladder hung close against the rock wall of the shaft and I had to kick it out at each step to get a foothold on the slats. The staging at the first level was still sound and I swung myself into the cavity, slipping out of the nylon rope and using the end of it to secure the ladder to the wooden frame. Then I started along the narrow tunnel.

It was a cross-cut and quite short. In a moment I was in the main gallery and had turned east along the line of the stoping. At this level the technique was crude, large pillars of gold-bearing quartz having been left to support the overlying rock. It was safe and with proper shoring the pillars could have been mined. After about two hundred yards the pillars became shorter, the reef gradually narrowing to the point where it was no longer workable. I went back then, past the cross-cut to the shaft, the going gradually becoming more difficult as I encountered roof falls. The rock at this western end was badly fractured with areas of definite instability, and the reef came to an abrupt end at a point of major faulting.

I went back to the shaft, called up it that I was okay, and then I took a chance and went scrambling down the stoping itself. Beyond the second level the roof pillars became fewer, the overburden supported by hand-built walls of red rock. The air had got to it, of course. It was quite humid at this depth, with moisture glistening on the walls, and this had helped the process of oxidization.

Those two levels were enough the convince me that the mine was valueless. Prophecy's information was largely correct. The reef had had a width of between four and eight feet, inclining down at an angle of roughly 40°. At the eastern end it virtually petered out and at the western end it ran into very heavy faulting. There was granite here, but in the main the overlay was a mixture of iron and silica with some shale, and it was this the miners had used to shore up the roof. Even supposing the reef continued at depth, the place was about as safe as a derelict coal mine with all the pit props rotted. Start drilling and shot firing anywhere underground and the whole thing would collapse.

I was at the third level then, the ground under my feet no longer dust, but packed firm, and damp in places. Tramlines showed intermittently, twin lines of rusted iron, and suddenly in the light from my lamp I saw the outline of a heel, hard and clear. A little further on, where the floor was almost mud, the imprint of rubber-soled shoes showed for about five yards. The pattern of the soles was quite distinct. It gave me an uncanny feeling, alone down there in the bowels of that abandoned mine and knowing that somebody else had been down there recently, might still be down there. No, that was ridiculous – pure imagination. But there was no doubt. Those footprints were quite fresh.

I had passed the cross-cut to the shaft and was nearing the westward end of the reef where it would finish at the fault. A drift opened up to my left, the floor slippery with damp and more footprints. They pointed both ways. He had gone into the drift and come out again. How long ago?

I squatted, peering at them closely. The mud was soft, the edge of the prints blurred. Water was seeping from a nearby crack in the rocks. Water in a land so dry! It couldn't have been long ago that he'd been here. Ed Garrety probably when he was fixing the bolt on the entrance door. Or had Westrop already been down when Garrety found him? Or was it somebody else, somebody I didn't know about – somebody who was still down here? I swung my head, directing the beam of the lamp along the gallery. Nothing, just the arched rock with a view of the stoping beyond, and on the floor, not two yards away, another footprint, very clear.

I took my helmet off, straightening up and swinging round to flat the lamp back down the way I had come. But there was nothing, of course, and I stepped into the drift. It turned out to be nothing more than a probe. About forty feet in it suddenly ceased. No quartz. No gleam of gold. Just iron-dark rock rusted in streaks by the moisture. What had decided the miners to give up at that precise point?

I went back down the drift, towards the heading where it entered the main gallery, my helmet still in my hand. I didn't care that my head was bare to any falling rock. With the lamp in my hand I could flash it quickly left and right as I stepped out into the gallery. It may seem silly – my nervousness. But an abandoned mine is a strange place. It has its own sort of atmosphere. I've been down quite a few in my time, but never anything as remote and unstable as Golden Soak, and never before or since with that strange sense of somebody watching me, a sort of presence. It wasn't just those footprints. I'm certain of that. Those were physical. This was something quite insubstantial and rather queer. And it was only here on the third level – I hadn't noticed it on the first two.

I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. Certainly not the ghosts of dead miners. If I believed in that sort of nonsense I wouldn't have gone into mining. There aren't many mines that haven't suffered some loss of life and in one or two of the old Cornish mines I'd been down.… Good God! if you believed in ghosts you'd be meeting the dead round every turn and twist of the narrow workings. But that doesn't mean I'm insensitive to the feel of a place. Old mines, like old houses, have their own atmosphere – a feel, an aura compounded of many things, but chiefly of the way men have handled the problems of working underground. It's there in the construction of the galleries, the cross-cuts, drifts and winzes, the way they have stoped and handled the ore. But here, on the third level of Golden Soak, it was something different, as though the rock itself had absorbed such a radiation of human fear that it could still infect the atmosphere of the place.

All this flashed through my mind as I moved slowly towards the western end of the reef, an attempt to rationalize the growing sense of unease. Another drift probing to the left and ending, like the first, at a bare rock face. I was into the faulted area then. No more sloping and the miners searching desperately for the new line of the reef. A third drift, to the right this time, and then my lamp was shining on the end of the main gallery, the roof so low it was no more than a hole, and to the left a final probe, damp seeping and a mêlée of footprints all made by the same person.

It was here in this final drift that I found what he had been looking for. It was a very narrow passageway, barely wide enough to swing a pick in, the roof all faulted, lumps of rock littering the floor. It reminded me of Balavedra – the older workings. I put my helmet on, the lamp showing rubble ahead, water dripping from the roof. It wasn't level like the others, but descended steeply, an angle of about 20°. It was more like a winze, and it was a deeper probe. I didn't like it. The roof was unstable and there was water in pools among the fallen rocks. About seventy yards in I was clambering over rubble, my head bent so that I could see where I was treading. And then suddenly I stopped. The rubble under me was no longer composed only of that dull red iron ore streaked with rust. Mixed with it were small jagged pieces of rock so white and coarsely crystalline that it looked like Parian marble. I picked up a piece and caught the gleam of gold in the lamplight.

It was quartz.

They had found the reef again. That was my first thought. Then I raised my head, the lamplight showing piled-up rubble half blocking the passage and the roof above it still the same red rock.

I stood there for a moment, puzzling over it. And then I was crawling on my hands and knees over the rubble, peering ahead down the drift to see the reef quartz showing white in the dark recess of it. Quartz in fragments was mixed with the piled-up granite of the fall, a shovel lying on the debris, and in the cleared space, between the jagged rock face and the rubble pile on which I crouched, a pick was propped against the wall.

I didn't go any further. I didn't need to. The pick and that shovel told their story. They belonged with the footprints I had been following. Garrety? Westrop? Somebody had discovered that the reef continued. Or was it an entirely new reef? I picked up a piece of quartz and examined it more closely. The glitter of the gold was clear to the naked eye. There were specks of black, too, and the white of the quartz was smudged with Grey. Gold in antimony?

I looked again at the gaping hole torn out of the roof of the gallery by the rock fall, probing with my limp. The reef showed as a narrow band of jagged quartz. No way of telling what its width was or how far it extended into the rock. And this wasn't a recent fall. Damp had discoloured the exposed surfaces of the iron formation above and the rubble under my feet showed the rusty discoloration of water seepage from the porous iron ore. Whoever had been working down here recently certainly hadn't caused it. The fall had happened a long time ago.

And then, of course, it came to me – this was the 1939 cave-in. This was where the rock and water had poured in upon the miners Ed Garrety's father had employed in a last desperate attempt to find the reef again. And they had found it. But they hadn't known that as they ran for their lives. The only one who knew was the man whose footprints I had been following.

The atmosphere of the place seemed stronger then and I hastily filled the haversack with samples of quartz and scrambled back over the heaped-up pile of rubble, conscious of the irony of it. To find the reef again and not to know, and all so pointless, the mine uneconomic anyway.

Beyond the rock pile the footprints showed again in the beam of my lamp, and I stared at them as I moved on down the narrow tunnel of the drift, wondering about the man who had made them, why he had opened up the drift so laboriously, working alone down here with nothing more than a pick and shovel. As Kadek had said, if the mine was uneconomic thirty years ago it would be doubly so now. So what was the point, unless the ore content.…' I stopped then. I was almost back at the main gallery and I stood there, one of the samples in my hand, looking at it closely. The grey smudges.… It wasn't the content that had changed, it was the price. The price of antimony.

Gold
and
antimony. I stared at the smudged white glitter of the sample in my hand, excited now, seeing suddenly the solution to my own problems, as well as those of Jarra Jarra. But I would need to get it chemically tested, the gold assayed, also the antimony content, if it was antimony. And then we'd have to test drill. A lot of time, a lot of money. I dropped the fragment back into the haversack and stood for a moment staring down at a damp patch that showed the imprint of the man who had discovered it clear and sharp, the whole foot. It was the right foot and I put my own alongside it. A little longer, a little broader; a big man then, and Westrop hadn't been big. Whoever it was, he wasn't here now and I went back down the main gallery, found the cross-cut to the shaft, and then I was leaning out from the staging, the lamplight shining on water and the ladder running straight down into it. The shaft was like a well. Water here in abundance and cattle dying on the surface. It didn't make sense, this crazy, empty, burned-up country. I called up to Prophecy, and when she answered, her voice echoing and swelling in down the shaft, I swung myself out on to the ladder and started slowly up it. The wooden rungs were still solid, but the iron fastenings that held it to the rock were loose in places, and though I kept my body pressed against it, that ladder scared me, so that I was relieved to find the one leading up to the first level more secure. But it was still good to switch to the rope ladder and the security of the nylon safety rope.