Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
I was going to find Gary’s head on the pillow next to mine. Luckily, no. I seemed to have made it to bed on my own.
Do I mean luckily?
I’m only joking. I do remember most of Friday night. I behaved with commendable control, given that the first Laphroaig was followed by several more. Nick would have been proud of me. If you’re going to drink, he’d say, learn to hold it, like I do. Then he’d fall over.
I don’t think I said anything too embarrassing. I remember talking very intensely about mining, and about how going underground is always about daring yourself, but making sure you have the best possible odds of coming out again alive. And Gary nodding, and looking at me with those weathered blue eyes, and lighting another of his tasteless cigarettes for me. He’s a good listener, I’ll give him that.
My foot touches mud: the bottom of the shaft. It’s already warmer, though distinctly damp: the temperature in the stone mines is a constant fifteen degrees or so, summer and winter. Gary jumps down the last couple of rungs to land beside me, and heads for the switchboard on the wall. The daylight doesn’t illuminate much, so I can hear rather than see Dickon reaching the end of the ladder …
And feel it. Bloody hell. That was deliberate, I’m sure. The bastard meant to brush an arm across my breast.
I’m vibrating with anger and ready to confront him, when Gary flicks the switches and everything suddenly goes bright.
God, it’s beautiful.
The light shows us huge spaces like the undercroft of a cathedral, a rocky ceiling supported by pillars that taper towards the bottom. The stone is every shade of creamy yellow you can imagine. It’s like butter, like honey, like toffee. When you get it above ground, limestone weathers and turns greyish. But down here it’s juicy, running with sap, soft, delicious and golden.
‘You been into an underground quarry before, Kit?’ says Gary.
‘I’ve never worked in limestone. Most of the stabilization I’ve done has been in Cornwall–old copper and tin mines.’
The stone’s soft because it’s full of water. In the ground, limestone soaks up moisture: quarry sap, it’s called. Above ground the sap will evaporate, and the rock will harden and cure. But before that it is easily worked, sliced out of the earth like cheese. It’s a freestone, and the men who shaped it into blocks were called freemasons. You can cut it in any direction, saw it like timber, carve it as easily as wood. It carves more easily, because there’s no grain to consider.
The stones that built Bath’s Pump Room might have been lifted from right where I’m standing. It’s a pity they can’t run coach tours through here: the American and Japanese tourists would love it, camera flashes bouncing off the ceiling like underground lightning.
The archaeologist blows his nose and it feels like somebody farted in church.
Gary sees my expression, and smiles. He has a lovely smile. It’s like the rock: sunny and solid and reassuring. For a moment I could almost forget that this glorious cathedral has to be filled with concrete.
I look around again, this time using my professional eye. Jesus Christ. I’ve been in some wobbly places, but this beats the lot.
The big caverns like this one are called voids. Artificial metal and wood tunnels run through them. They look like long cages with great spidery steel or timber struts for walls, and solid reinforced roofs. We have to stay inside them because it’s too dangerous to walk outside. For the past year, since the construction phase of the project began, teams of miners have been building these roadways to take us metre by metre through the quarries, and they’re nowhere near finished yet. After concrete has been pumped into the voids and the job is finished, far in the future, the steel roads will still be here, wormholes through the fill, so bats can fly in and out.
‘You ready for this, Kit?’ says Gary. He strikes me as a bit overprotective, but that’s not uncommon among the men I’ve worked with. He pats the self-rescuer on his belt, and for about the fourth time glances to check we haven’t lost ours. Just in case the roof falls in. If it does, and buries us, we’ve got about an hour of breathable oxygen in these little bottles.
Fu-u-uck.
Weirdly, though, the main thing I feel is relief. The electric light, the glinting steel roadways running through the voids have chased away the ghosts. It’s nothing like I remember it in that long-ago dry summer. But the smell is the same, that sharp, damp, limey scent you can almost taste.
‘The miners use the vertical shaft because it’s the quickest way into the areas we need to stabilize,’ says Gary, as we start to walk through the metal-sided tunnel, boots skidding on the muddy ground. ‘But we bring the heavy plant in through the Stonefield entrance, a couple of streets away. A lot of the entrances to the workings are level access, adits into the hillside. They’re almost all blocked off now, and have been since the 1960s.’ He glances at me. ‘But I expect you know that.’
‘Don’t assume anything,’ I say. ‘This is nothing like my last job. Christ, look at some of these pillars. That one looks about as load-bearing as a Twiglet.’
‘This is one of the oldest parts of the mine,’ Dickon chips in. ‘Worked out in the early eighteenth century. Very typical, tapering shape to the pillars, partly because they’ve been robbed for stone over and over again by later generations, but also to support the roof. They’re made as wide as possible at the top, to form a series of near-arches. Keeps the ceiling up.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I find myself saying, before I can stop myself.
‘Pardon?’ Dickon swivels his head sharply and for once looks at my face.
‘The old quarrymen might have thought that, but they would have been wrong. It’s true that an arch is more stable than a flat ceiling, but these pillars are far too widely spaced to form proper arches. That’s partly why there’s a problem.’
Dickon’s jaw drops, though I can’t think why. He must know that a mining engineer understands basic structures; and so should an archaeologist. The look he shoots me is distinctly poisonous. Well, I don’t like your dripping nose, sunshine. Or your wandering hands. I’m going to make damn sure you know you were out of order touching me. Perhaps he’s not used to being shown up by a woman because he strides off at a lick, shaking his head.
Gary raises an eyebrow at me, with an amused grin. ‘You’ve made a pal there.’
‘Sorry. Maybe I was a bit brusque. But he was explaining it like I was a schoolgirl. And wrong, too.’
‘This is the first underground job he’s had.’ Dickon has already disappeared round the corner into the next void; Gary dawdles and keeps his voice low. ‘We had a brilliant bloke before him, retired now, knew everything there was to know about mining and quarrying. Dickon comes at it from a different direction–his speciality is railways and tramlines, industrial transport. If we come across a set of wheel ruts or a metal rail, which we do quite often, he’s your man. As for the rest, he’s picking it up as he goes. He’s keen, I’ll give him that.’
The metal roadway is solid and comforting, insulating us from the vast uneasy darkness beyond. We could be astronauts, looking at the void from the safety of a space station. There are cables running above our heads, carrying power for the lighting, and the messages from Brendan’s hi-tech canaries. I can see why he’s so concerned with the ground-movement monitors: some of the pillars are badly faulted. It’s a relief when we follow the roadway round the corner into what is clearly a more recent section of the quarry; the pillars are broader and solid, and the voids are smaller chambers.
Dickon must be getting over his fit of pique because he’s waiting for us, pointing to a pillar with a dark, wedge-shaped shadow at its foot.
‘Wheelbarrow.’ His eyes slide back to my chest. ‘Abandoned here when the mine closed a hundred years ago. The wood eventually rotted away and left a black mark, exactly the shape of the barrow.’
The thought makes me shiver.