The Hollow Land (7 page)

“Are we down?”

“Aye—but wait till I get—”

“It's not deep.”

“Not yet. Wait. Where's the torch?”

“It's a queer smell.”

“It gets worse. Nearer the trucks. Like dead bodies. Mind, we're not going far. We take a quick look at them trucks and we go straight back. To get back you get onto my shoulders and I jump you up again. Then you lean down in and pull me out after. See? Look.” He turned his torch up to the faint light from the blazing day outside, then along the tunnel they stood in. They had dropped through its roof. Stones and rubble lay underfoot. The tunnel went in two directions, each into deep darkness. The torch, when Bell shone it at the roof, picked out small glitters and spangles like frosted cobwebs.

“Is it real silver?”

“I'd say so.”

“Already? But we can't be that far down inside?”

“The mines over Alston you can see the silver from the very pit-head. Just by looking through the bars of the grille-thing at the entrance. We went at our school. For history.”

“Can we get some? Why did they leave it?”

“Not worth picking out, this lot. The stuff worth having is deep down. Miles down. They used to take folks down there for jaunts in the old days. All dolled-up folks. Rich folks. Used to go down for kicks, wrapped in fancy dustsheets to see the poor miners slaving away. Used to travel down in the little wagons. Sat on little benches, screaming and hugging each other like in a ghost train.”

“Why can't we go down?”

“Don't be soft. It's not maintained now. It's probably all fell in further off. We'd get down there and there'd be a shift and we be gonners. I'se not daft.”

“What's a shift?”

“It's what you get round here. Limestone. Ask yon James. It'll be in his book. It was a shift when my grandad flattened his leg. In Light Trees Home Field. It just suddenly rippled about and threw him down. Like someone moving about under blankets—some giant—he said. Rocks all came tumbling. They call them earthquakes in Japan. Hey—look. Here we are.”

Walking one behind the other, one hand to the tunnel wall and the torch jerking here and there, Bell's foot had come up against something that wasn't rock.

“Here's the rails. Feel.”

“They're not wood. They clank.”

“They didn't
stay
wood. That was in old ancient times. This mine was in business not that long since. It only stopped when Grandad was a lad. It got too expensive and there was a war and that. Look.”

The torch shone on the back of a little wagon. It was attached to another, and another. A little string of them.

Propped against the side of one was a fine large pick and a spade.

“Just left here. Just
left
. Look here—”

There were cans and buckets and a couple of spidery, rusty lanterns and two or three tin mugs.

“My—they must have left in a hurry. Fancy leaving all this when they was all poor and going to be out of jobs. What was that?”

“What?”

“Noise like a sort of a shower.”

“I didn't hear.”

“A sort of rumble. Oh!”

From behind them down the tunnel there came a long swishing noise. A sort of sigh, then silence.

“It sounded like water or something,” said Harry.

“No. It'll not be water. It's dry enough.”

“I heard your grandad say ‘The drier on top'—”

“Aye, I know, ‘the wetter below'. But that's the underground rivers. There's no rivers down here. It's a ship-shape mine. It's dry as dry. Look.” He shone the torch along the slope of the floor, which was dry, though in the two runnels the rails were set in was a thick gluey white liquid like condensed milk.

“I don't like look of yon,” said Harry. Before Bell could correct the yon, there came from down the tunnel a very long and hostile swish and hiss—a sound like a great serpent stirring towards them from the bottom of the mine. Then a thundering long rumble, and a puff of something. They clung to the wagon, and their eyes and noses stung and they began to cough. After what seemed a long time the air cleared, and there was complete silence.

“What was it Bell?”

“We'd best go see.”

They walked the little way back again to the hole they had dropped through, feeling the wall as it curved round and slightly down, and came to where they had started out. A solid barrier of earth and rocks completely blocked the tunnel. The hole in the roof, its edges loosened first by them and by the dryness of the earth around, had crumbled and dribbled and showered into the darkness below. First the soil, then smaller stones and then the huge chunks and blocks of rock had settled in tons into the space prepared for them.

There was no sign in the tunnel where five minutes ago they had looked up at the sky that the sun and the grasses and the sheep and the flying grouse were still passing a summer's day hardly ten feet above their heads.

And there was not the least chance in the world of getting out.

 

Mrs. Bateman, back from Penrith with her arms full of clean washing and a lot of parcels, walked into Light Trees' kitchen and called, “Harry?”

She looked in the back dairy and saw that the sandwiches for Harry's lunch were still under the Pyrex dish and the apples and chocolate lay uneaten beside them. He'll be hungry, she thought, when he does get home. He's been off on the fell a long time. Still, he'll be all right with Bell. Bell knows every inch up there and it's a fine day. No mist to get lost in.

She opened up one of the parcels she had bought in Penrith market and shook out a flannel nightdress with ribbons and lace, and a long apron of white cotton and a sacking apron to wear over it. “Lovely,” she said, parading about. “Museum pieces. Lovely.” She put on the white apron, which had a pinny top and cross-overs at the back. “Florence Nightingale,” she said, twisting before the mirror hung in the porch. She tied the sacking apron over it. “Now I'm ready to clean out my chicken-houses,” she said.

“Silly,” she said next, “playing at being someone else. Ridiculous. Just as well I'm alone.” She began to unpack the rest of the shopping and the grandfather clock struck five.

“I wonder where he is though?” she said, and went and stood on the step and stared about. Then she picked up the field glasses and went and stood in the Home Field. Through the glasses the fells lay as still and empty as they did through her eyes. “Harry!” she called. Her voice echoed. She went in and got the bell she used to ring for Harry to come in for meals when he was smaller and played in the beck, just out of sight.

She kept calling and looking and ringing, but nothing happened. She went in and began to wash salad for supper, thinking that the sacking apron was just the thing for cleaning vegetables. She switched on the radio. She made a pudding. She realized that the radio had been telling her for some time the stock market prices in London and the details of the shipping forecast for the next twenty-four hours, and that listening to it she had been thinking all the time about Harry.

She put down the potato peeler and set off up the fell.

I suppose I could have waited till James came in or Robert got back from London. I'm over-anxious. I always was a bore about the children. Silly to worry so.

She walked along the dry beck strewn everywhere with whitening thistles and climbed up to the top of the bouse, where someone seemed to have been digging lately. A lot of earth had fallen into a deep delve in the fell, with turf torn up and the roots of a may tree sticking up at an angle, feeling the fresh air for the first time since Queen Anne was on the throne. A shift, she thought. A landslip. Like when poor old Mr. Hewitson got injured. Quite a big one. Maybe it's subsidence in the old mine. She thought of the honeycombs of rocks beneath her feet, and the rocks, hollow like bones, leading to underground rivers and ballrooms and cathedrals below, and shuddered. The one thing I'd regret about us coming up here would be if any of them ever took up potholing.

She thought for a moment that she heard voices, and stopped. Then she thought she heard a faint metallic hammering noise, very thin and distant. “Kendal says it's haunted up here,” she said, and hurried on, and up to the top of the fell where you could see in all directions, right to the Nine Standards, the huge old stones that watched from the horizon.

She stood in the long white apron, shading her eyes.

 

“Wake up,” said Bell, “wake up Harry lad. Here. We've got to yell again.”

Harry stirred but didn't wake. Bell shook him. “Here. Harry. It's late. It must be about night. They'll be looking by now. There's sense yelling now. More sense than before when they was all away.”

“My throat's sore.”

“It'll be sorer if we're here all night. It's going to get right cold soon. This place has never seen the sun in a million years.”

They were behind the iron-barred grille at the entrance to the mine, peering out into the cave beyond it over the rubbish and rubble of the sixty years since the bars had been fixed. The outer cave mouth was a maddening ten feet away from the inner, barred opening. From the cave mouth the bouse fell steeply away so that you could see the light beyond beginning to change to shadow as it drew to evening. To Bell and Harry it seemed near midnight.

“We ought to start bashing again, too.”

“The tin cans and that are wore out.”

“There's the pick and shovel. Come on.”

Bell began a great assault on the thick iron bars.

“It's killing me ears,” said Harry.

“Get to work with that shovel.”

Harry made some lesser noises with the shovel. Then they both stopped and cried “Help” for a while.

Then they sat down again and stared at the bars. After a while Harry said, “We'll likely die.”

“Get away,” said Bell. But dismally. His face was streaked with dirt. It looked gaunt. He kicked the bars with his foot. “By God,” he said. “I'se sorry for animals.”

“Animals? Sheep could get out. They could ease their way out if they ever wandered in. Dogs could get out. Rabbits could get out. Hares could get out.”

“I mean gorillas. Lions and tigers.”

“Foxes could get out. Ferrets could get out.”

“I mean zoo animals. Caged up. We're caged up. We're caged up like slaves or gorillas. I'll never go near a zoo again.”

“Snakes could get out.” Harry picked up the end of a chain which hung from the wagon behind him. Already they had tried to heave at the wagons to make them roll up against the iron bars and break the grille down; but it meant pushing uphill and they were anyway afraid that they might block the entrance altogether and bring down everything. “I'd say we were going to die,” Harry said again. He began to feed the chain through the bars. After a bit he had to help it along by jabbing it with the shovel, pushing the shovel sideways through the bars and holding tight to the other end.

“Have you read
Huckleberry Finn
?” asked Bell.

“No.”

“Just as well. What you doing?”

“Watching the chain being a snake. Why is it just as well?”

“There was a place like this in
Huckleberry Finn
. Some kids got lost in caves. When they got themselves out—miles away back from the place they'd started—everyone thought they was dead. So all their families blocked up the proper entrance so no other kids could go in again.”

“Well I don't wonder at that,” said Harry, pressing his face into the bars and jabbing on at the chain with the shovel end, urging it down the slope towards the cave mouth.

“No, but there was someone else left inside. A terrible Indian. Ages later when someone went up to have another look around, there was this dead skeleton lying, stretching out its poor bony hands. Horrible.”

Harry stretched his hands and his arms out to their furthest extent through the bars and forced the chain forward a few more links. “Dead skeleton,” he said. “That's not so bad. It's live skeletons I don't like.”

“Aye. Think of his last hours.”

“D'you think these are our last hours?”

“If we don't get clanking and shouting again they are. Go on. Get clanking that shovel against the bars again. Gis hold of the pick and I'll have a thrust at that chain.”

 

After the morning's thistling Old Hewitson had gone off down Quarry Hill with his scythe over his shoulder like Old Father Time, and James alongside. They waited a while on the wooden bridge in the village for Kendal the sweep. When Kendal's Land-Rover appeared Old Hewitson, James and the scythe were all installed in it and the Land-Rover turned and made for a remote farmhouse on Stainmore where propped against the yard wall there stood a large brass bed.

The two ends of the bed and the metal base were lifted into the Land-Rover and then everyone went into the farmhouse for tea.

This took a very long time, for there was a lot to talk about—there is always more to talk about in places where not much seems to happen—and the farmer and his wife did not set them over the yard to the Land-Rover again to say goodbye and thank them for taking the bed off their hands until after five o'clock.

Then there had to be another long talk from the steering-wheel and by the time they eventually rattled off and reached the village, it was time for the stock market prices and the shipping forecast, had they been interested in either.

Through the village they went and up Quarry Hill past Light Trees and as far as the culvert bridge over the dry beck.

“Now's the problem,” said Kendal. “How to get the bed up the fell.”

“I thistled this place this morning,” said Old Hewitson. “We might see if it'll run along the beck bottom.”

The Land-Rover lumbered down the bank and into the stream bed. It took its way along with the two old men, now and then hitting their heads on the Land-Rover roof, and James constantly holding his shin. “Good for the liver,” said Kendal.