‘You know, if I ’ad to make a list of all the people I’d least like to spend me last day on earth with, I reckon you’d top the list,’ said Rawdon conversationally.
‘Higher than Joe?’ Adam asked.
Rawdon laughed in spite of himself. ‘No, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Joe’s a pain in the backside, ’e is.’
They went on in silence with Rawdon leading the way, holding the lamp aloft. Here and there, on either side, they passed old stalls where miners had once worked. There were chalk marks on the walls and sometimes a scrawled name. Adam picked up a cloth haversack from a wooden shelf and it fell apart in his hands, the stitching long since gnawed apart by rats. Each time they stopped, they could hear them scurrying away through the dust, squeaking news of the boys’ arrival as they ran. The noise reminded Adam of when old Beaky had shut him up in the school cellar when he was small and the remembered sense of claustrophobia made him shudder, weakening him at the knees.
All at once the tunnel widened out and they felt a sense of space opening out around them. In the lamplight the boys made out a succession of tall black columns on all sides, supporting the roof. Adam gasped in surprise, momentarily forgetting their plight. The place was beautiful; it was like a crude version of one of the old Greek temples that were illustrated in his school textbooks.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘Old workin’s – pillar an’ stall, they call it,’ said Rawdon. ‘Sometimes they mine like this, leavin’ pillars to support the roof, although they usually takes ’em out at the end. Lucky for us, I s’pose, that they didn’t.’
Whenever the path significantly divided, as it did on the other side of the pillared hall, Rawdon stopped to sniff the stale air on either side of the crossgate, trying to work out which way the oxygen was coming from. The air quality was poor, but the fact that they were able to breathe at all meant that there had to be a way back to the upcast or downcast shafts if only they could find it. Sometimes they were encouraged as they felt the ground rising beneath their weary feet but then for no apparent reason they would start going downhill again, back down into the labyrinth.
The gradient changed but the heat and the darkness remained constant. They had found no trace of the mine’s ventilation system since the rock fall and they’d long ago stripped down to their underwear. Thirst was fast becoming the worst of their problems. Rawdon had a half-full water bottle and they used tiny amounts when they stopped to rest to wet their lips (despite his reminder of their declared enmity Rawdon seemed to take it for granted that everything they had should be shared equally between them), but there was not enough in the bottle to enable them to take a proper drink and the coal dust that flew up into the air as they walked got into their mouths and added to the parching of their throats. The overhead pipes dripping water that Adam remembered from his last visit to the mine were absent from this district and he looked longingly down at the puddles of black water that lay here and there on the ground, although he didn’t need Rawdon to tell him that they were poisonous, impregnated with coal, and gas too probably.
Above their heads the roof sagged and Adam sensed that it was only a matter of time before some of the rotten timber props gave way and another rock fall left them buried alive, dying slowly and painfully without even the hope of the bloody euthanasia that had delivered the pony from its suffering. They were both exhausted and, although he wouldn’t admit it, Rawdon’s bad leg had begun to cause him intense pain. Adam could see him wince with every step they took.
Despair overtook them when the passage opened out again and they emerged into the same pillared hall that they had passed through hours before. Rawdon sank to the ground, leaning his back against one of the black columns and closed his eyes.
‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘You carry on if you want to. I knew this mine’d be the death of me the first day I went down it. I’d ’ave been better off if I’d cashed in me chips when that friggin’ pony kicked me. It’d ’ave saved me a lot o’ grief.
Adam tried to find some words of comfort or encouragement but he could think of nothing. All that was keeping him standing was the stubborn animal refusal to be beaten that had enabled him to endure so much misfortune already in his life. It was an undying spark somewhere deep inside him that stopped him giving in even when his brain told him there was no point in continuing, and now it forced him to bend down and pick up the lamp and go on.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said, looking at Rawdon for a moment before he left him in the darkness. But there was no reply: Rawdon had slumped over on to his side and seemed to be asleep.
Once again, passing between the pillars of coal, Adam thought of the beautiful silver-white temples of Greece and Sicily, bathed in sunlight, that he now would never see. The outer columns collectively called the peristasis which surrounded the pronaos, the four-sided porch that led in turn through a beautifully carved set of double doors to the cella, the holy of holies at the centre of the building that housed the exquisite statue of the god which only his priests were ever allowed to see.
Except of course that there was no God or gods – of that Adam was by now quite certain. His mother and Parson Vale and the ancient Greeks were fools – poor credulous fools; at the centre of everything was nothing, just a vast emptiness in which your voice echoed back off the walls. Echoes of echoes: that was all.
At the end of the hall, Adam reached the crossgate where he had stood with Rawdon hours before. He was almost certain they had gone to the right, although the more he thought about it, the less sure he was. The darkness unsettled his memory and he hesitated, turning the lamp from side to side in a vain attempt to find something he recognized before he followed his first instinct and went left.
Almost immediately the path sloped uphill and the quality of the air seemed to improve. A few turnings later and he stumbled out into a wide open space and looked up to where the downcast shaft rose up half a mile to the surface. At the top the underside of the suspended cage blocked most of Adam’s view of the sky and the dim light which did get through gave him no clue as to the time of day. He shouted for help until he was hoarse but there was no response except the mocking echo of his voice bouncing back to him off the red bricks lining the sides of the shaft. Rawdon had been right – there was nobody looking for them.
But there was still hope: from just above Adam’s head an iron ladder cemented into the brickwork ran straight as a die up the side of the shaft towards the surface. In the lamplight Adam could see its rusty brown side rails and narrow treads ascending into the gloom.
Rawdon was asleep on the floor when Adam got back to him, and he had to shake him awake.
‘Maybe we can wait,’ said Rawdon as he limped after Adam. ‘The miners’ll be back down ’ere soon. When no one’s working, the owner’s losin’ money and that matters to ’im a sight more’n respect for the dead, you mark my words.’
‘You’re worried about the ladder?’ asked Adam when they got back to the shaft.
‘Of course I bloody am. It’s been there forever an’ no one ever uses it or keeps it repaired. We’ll get ’alfway up an’ then we’ll come fallin’ back down again an’ drown in that sump down there,’ he said, pointing to the evil-smelling black pond at the bottom of the shaft.
Adam examined the bottom rungs of the ladder with the lamp and found it hard to disagree with Rawdon’s verdict. The brick lining the shaft was damp and mouldy and the brackets holding the side rails in place gave way alarmingly when he pulled on the two that were within reach. There had to be over a thousand treads between them and the surface and what were the chances that they would all hold?
He hesitated, uncertain of what to do. His instinct was to climb but common sense told him to wait. And perhaps he would have stayed below if the changing light of the lamp hadn’t taken the decision out of their hands. The flame had seemed to expand when they came out on to the landing by