He said that Dunton was an excellent fellow, though limited, very limited—which certainly meant that the doctor had at some time tried to preach common sense to him.
‘And now, would you mind telling me where we are?’
‘We are in the largest cavern of the Mendips,’ he said. ‘This is the secret.’
‘But why?’
He did not answer. They seemed to be as unaccountable as twelve-year-olds. All right, a private cave! So what? It was under Jedder’s land, and nobody could compel him to repeat the vulgarities of Cheddar if he didn’t want to.
‘And how do we get out?’
‘I fear I had to take a too sudden decision,’ Fosworthy replied. ‘That question did occur to me, only to be dismissed as momentarily irrelevant.’
‘You mean, we can’t get out except by the way we came in?’
‘I would not put it as strongly as that, but it might turn out to be so.’
‘Then I think we had better fight our way out now, while only Jedder is up top.’
‘He will, I am sure, have replaced the bales of hay. And in any case we cannot reach the hatch without a ladder.’
So that was what the aluminium ladder in the barn was for!
‘But in that case we are trapped.’
‘We may indeed have to endure hunger,’ Fosworthy remarked mildly. ‘To be alone here is unnerving. But surely much can be done when there are two of us together?’
The situation was plain disaster. If I had not been well used to the silence and drip of mines, I should have panicked. Even so I sounded shrill to myself as I put a vital question to Fosworthy. No, he answered, the lights could not be turned off from the surface. The switch for the gallery lights was at the bottom of the shaft, and the rest were controlled from the changing-room.
‘If I have understood the dialogue correctly,’ he said, ‘Tom Aviston-Tresco believes you will dissolve down here long before starvation does the same for me. In that case, thinking that I must be alone and harmless, he may take steps to find me and put me out of pain. Perhaps you would tell me why he is so sure you are doomed?’
I told him. He tut-tutted.
‘And I was convinced that I had protected you completely!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bless me, you must be in some discomfort! And I kept you standing so long last night!’
I did indeed feel sore the moment he mentioned it. I took down the mirror from the wall to inspect the damage. There was surprisingly little. That young doctor had done a good job. His plaster was still in place, though blood was oozing over the top of it where a stitch may have pulled out. My head was still very tender from Miss Filk’s fortunately lady-like blow, but I felt in fair condition. If anything remained of the drug, fear and violent action had blown it out of my system.
‘How did you get picked up?’ I asked.
‘I really cannot understand it at all. I did just what you told me, only I took a bus to the Pavilion instead of the Underground. I walked away from the hotel intending to take another bus to Hammersmith and was waiting at the stop when a woman drove up and asked if I would like a lift. I thought it most kind of her, and a great stroke of luck that she chanced to be going my way. It was getting late and I knew that the landlady at 34 Petunia Avenue is accustomed to retire at eleven.’
I interrupted impatiently to ask what had happened. Didn’t he recognise the driver?
‘No, she was quite unknown to me. Of course I am not very familiar with London, but after a while I began to feel that we were not on the right road for Hammersmith. She stopped on a common somewhere, which I observed with growing anxiety was entirely deserted. Then I was seized, with a hand over my mouth, and I knew no more, as they say. I should never have suspected Tom Aviston-Tresco of having such powers of organisation.’
He didn’t need any. When Fosworthy turned up at my flat for the second time, all he had to do was to whistle up one of Miss Filk’s little friends with a car and a winning manner. Even so something had gone wrong. Fosworthy had managed to reach his hotel, and while they were waiting outside thinking that the operation was off for the night and perhaps for good, damned if his preposterous chivalry didn’t make him walk out again!
As for the car driver, no doubt Miss Filk had dreamed up some romantic story to keep her mouth shut. Anything plausible would do, for she was not going to hear any more of her passenger. Police would not waste time in serious investigation just because so erratic a person had disappeared, nor newspapers be tempted to publish a photograph of him.
Silence and cold. Drip and echo. A loneliness where there was not even so distant a cousin as a scrap of plant life for company. I took down one of the sheepskin coats and put it on.
‘Who made all this?’ I asked.
‘Alan Jedder and one or two others. I helped.’
Fosworthy showed me Jedder’s tool store. It was well equipped with crowbars, picks and shovels, and plenty of electrical spare parts. I also found two coils of instantaneous fuse and a box of detonators. Unfortunately there were no explosives.
We took a pick and a crowbar with us. Fosworthy led the way along a lit passage, twisting, sometimes very narrow, sometimes opening out into considerable caves, and never going downhill for long. Aviston-Tresco’s torch, flashed into the clefts and dark holes along our path, showed that many of them dropped away into the heart of the hills. At one point the track was tilted towards a terrifying abyss, but wide enough for reasonable safety.
The place was a typical limestone cave of unknown dimensions. In fact most of them are of unknown dimensions until the pot-holers get busy; even then picks and ropes or an underwater dive will nearly always reveal more. We had travelled something over six hundred yards when we came to the last of the lights. It was above the entrance to a low, wide cleft on the right of the path. I threw a beam into it, but could distinguish nothing. We then climbed a steep slope where there was dry earth under foot instead of rock glazed by a film of stalagmite.
‘This is the other way out, but we blocked it,’ Fosworthy said. ‘I am very concerned lest we may have done it too thoroughly.’
So was I. A big boulder looked as if it could be persuaded to roll down hill until I saw that it was held in position by smooth faces of concrete on which my pick rang and jarred.
‘How far to the surface?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen and a half feet,’ Fosworthy replied precisely.
‘What does the entrance look like from outside?’
‘It cannot be seen. We spread earth over rubble and planted grass and an elder in it.’
‘Is there any other way out?’
‘Jedder has never discovered one. But let us hope there is.’
Hope! The only hope was up the shaft and through the hatch, bales or no bales, and I wish I had recognised it then and there.
It would have taken a week to move the boulder with such tools as we had, and we should only come to more concrete, Fosworthy said. The sides of the passage, weatherworn before the entrance was blocked, were more promising. Fosworthy took over from me and valiantly wielded a pick. Every blow was driven home with the force of his obsession. Love unconquerable in battle!
We went on for hours, but it became plainer and plainer that all we were doing was digging a tunnel under a roof of solid limestone. Eventually we came up against a wall of sound rock at our working face. We should have died of starvation before we ever got through.
We resumed our sheepskin coats and drank from a dark, icy pool where drips had collected. Then we walked wearily back along the lit passage to try the hatch. In the changing-room and the shored gallery the silence sang, neutral as the grave and as indifferent to our presence. We could not reach the hatch in spite of a crazy erection of baulks of timber and the table. Fosworthy, taller than I, just touched it before our scaffolding collapsed. Even if it hadn’t, a hand—with no firm foothold beneath—was useless against half a ton of hay.
During a long rest to recover some strength we considered the only two courses open
to us. We could wait in the changing-room indefinitely until Jedder and his friends opened the hatch, or we could explore the whole cave system at the risk of losing ourselves. Putting my trust in surprise, I wanted to switch off the lights and wait, though I doubted my own patience to endure such blind emptiness.
Fosworthy voted for exploration. He would. He was always an optimist when plunging at the unknown. Still, he had a case. He thought it might be days before anyone opened the hatch. That was not altogether consistent with his belief that Aviston-Tresco would come and put him out of pain as soon as the arm had been treated, but I gave way to him. Anything was better than sitting still.
All he knew was that Jedder had come across a stream. Well, that was encouraging. But it did not have to emerge on the surface; it could seep into marsh or spring up into the bed of one of the many lowland brooks. The complex of Cheddar caves was too far away for any connection to be discoverable. The extent of Wookey Hole and the other smaller caverns of the Mendips was known. I was inclined to think that the exit, if any, would be beneath the north-eastern escarpment, since any considerable spring bursting out of the limestone on the south-west would have been thoroughly investigated by local landowners hoping for another tourist gold-mine.
In the tool store Fosworthy found three lanterns, clean and full up with paraffin. A second useful discovery was a compass, which at least would allow me the illusion that I was going somewhere. We had no string, and the only rope, wound on the drum of a winch, was not long enough to be worth taking. The next best thing, though far too heavy, was a drum of electric flex. We carried this between us on a crowbar through the middle and set off.
I found that the lit passage ran very roughly west. Only one of the openings on the northern side offered a practicable route, leading us down until we came to a great bubble in the rock not far from the blocked entrance, but on a lower level. There were several clefts in the walls. One of them, which we could just pass on hands and knees, gave access to a more open system with magnificent stalactites like the ranged pipes of a cathedral organ. This was the time to start paying out flex. I had trouble already in identifying the hole by which we had entered.
We chose the easiest passage, again running sharply down hill, and soon found that without ropes our movements were very limited. Fosworthy was eager to climb down funnels which were far too dangerous. Once committed to the choice of a northwards direction, he was like a child in convincing himself that it must be right. But I wasn’t permitting any such rashness. I had experience of shafts which could be descended by jumps, drops and slithers and were utterly impossible to climb.
So we had to go where we could and accept the frequent compass readings which insisted that we had travelled round in a circle or a figure of eight. When the flex ran out we were heading south-west and had probably crossed the line of the lit passage at least one hundred feet beneath it.
The wash of a stream was now faintly audible, though hard to distinguish from the hissing of ears in that sepulchral silence. A distant plop of water from the roof would be startling as a live presence, and I would search for it with the beam of the torch. Outside the tiny circle of our lanterns, there was no such thing as direction. Not even sound had direction.
We left one of the lanterns standing on the now empty drum of flex and made our way cautiously to the edge of the water. It was running smoothly in a channel some six feet below the older terrace on which we stood and did not seem of sufficient volume to force a way out at the foot of the hills. It did flow north-east, however.
As far as my beam reached, the terrace offered no difficulty, continuing along the right bank under a roof of widely varying height. I went back to fetch the lantern and put it down to mark the small orifice through which we had come to the water. Between that point and the end of the flex there was no possibility of losing the way.
We set out along the course of the stream and may have travelled a quarter of a mile before it vanished down a hole in the floor of an irregular cavern of immense height. Leaving this sluice behind and on our left, we came to a tunnel leading steeply upwards. Water had been running down it, and I was convinced by the deposit of mud that it was surface water, possibly overflowing from spring or marsh in winter. It was blazing lunacy to follow this tempting pot-hole without flex to find the way back. But every despairing move we made was lunacy.
I still think that we were on a route to the surface which could have been managed by a properly equipped expedition. Fosworthy and I, however, were stopped by a sudden and slippery rise in the pot-hole. We dreamed of it as a sure ladder to the blessed sky, but were helpless. The next thirty feet of rock were sheer.
We turned back. I had been carefully registering the few openings out of our tunnel and had no fear of losing the way; in any case we had the deposit left by the winter torrent as a guide. Eventually we reached the flats where the stream disappeared and followed the terrace on the right bank expecting to pick up the light of the lantern at any minute. We did not pick it up. Instead, we came to a rock fall which we had certainly never crossed.
Obviously there were two streams, one a tributary of the other. We must have emerged from our pot-hole by a slightly different route, identified the sluice by ear rather than eye, and chosen the wrong terrace. The circle of dim light, within which were our bodies and our forlorn determination to live, had a radius which was ample in a narrow passage but inadequate in larger caverns where an area of blackness might be an opening or simply space. However sure we were that we had made no mistake, any mistake was possible.
We retraced our steps to try and find the correct terrace. Landmarks, such as they were, appeared unfamiliar, but that was to be expected. When approached from the opposite direction, every rock formation had a different set of shadows. At last we heard the unmistakable gurgle of the fall and arrived at it by squeezing through a slot like a couple of twisted pennies. The water was surging down from above. We were on the left bank of the stream, not the right.
My guess as to what had happened is no more good now than it was then. I had been concentrating my attention on the walls of the cave and the accidents under foot, never turning a beam on the flow of the water. Somewhere we had reached a third tributary and followed it down.
No explanation. Nothing. It was far worse than to be lost among the involutions of some vast rock chamber when one could at least keep one’s head and systematically explore the openings till they were identified. But in that sump of waters we had nothingness. Instinct, intelligence, the senses—they were all put out of action.
The worst of it was that I had been navigating by water, not by compass. I sat down and cursed—frenzied, filthy swearing. Fosworthy’s reaction was astonishing.
‘My dear man, the fear of dissolution is so absurd,’ he said. ‘It is nothing but a moment’s suffering.’
His tone was in no way unctuous, but simple, sure and comforting. However, I was in no mood for it. I remarked that when it was a question of his Cynthia he didn’t seem to enjoy more than anyone else the thought of being bloody well dissolved.
‘That is different,’ he replied. ‘I am exercised by the conditions of survival, not the fact.’
We rested, shivered and drank. We tried again. I cannot clearly remember much of it. My watch said that we spent five hours stumbling about aimlessly and getting physically weaker. It could have been seventeen hours, but the paraffin in the lantern would not have lasted that long. It went out, of course, at last, and we had nothing left but Aviston-Tresco’s excellent electric torch.
Again we heard the fall and worked towards it. We had long since given up following the courses of streams. The fall was something we knew, somewhere to die. One’s strong instinct—if I make myself plain—is not to die nowhere. The mere rediscovery comforted us a little. Fosworthy said:
‘Suppose this is the bottom of the sluice which we first saw from the top.’
I replied that it didn’t matter if it was; we could not climb it.
‘Let us assume it is,’ he insisted. ‘We are travelling in a three-dimensional world which soon we will be unable to see. We must always go uphill and, when we can, always in the direction of the fall, watching the compass as long as we have light.’
It was better than giving up. The problem, of course, was how far to continue away from the fall in the hope of finding a way back towards it. The amazing thing is that we never disputed over this. I must have caught some of his gentleness.
At last we heard the gurgle of water again and knew that this time we must be well above the level of the bottom of the fall. But there was no going on. The flashlight showed a clear drop below us. At the limit of the beam was the sluice. We were looking out from a window high up in the cave which contained the original stream, unmistakably plunging downwards, the terrace we had followed, the entries to the steep pot-hole and presumably a bend of the tributary which had misled me.
Fosworthy was determined to attempt the descent. Myself, I would have gone on wandering rather than tackle that drop; but to him it was a short cut with Undine somewhere at the ultimate end of it. He hurled his coat over the edge and climbed down the first twenty feet. Then he had to let go, and fall or glissade until he fetched up against a lumpy, mushroomy growth of stalagmite. He hit it and called up that he was all in one piece.
‘I may by misadventure have broken a toe,’ he said, ‘but I shall be able to catch you.’
I threw the torch down to him, muffled in my coat. As soon as he found it and lit up the darkness, I followed. He did not exactly break my fall. He saved my life by catching a foot as I missed the stalagmites and was shooting past him.
The rest of the descent was not difficult. We then set out along the once familiar terrace, hurrying and tripping since the torch was now dying. The lantern we had left behind was, of course, out, and we searched for it desperately until one of us fell over it. We were in bad shape, Fosworthy limping and I streaming blood from a jagged wound in the neck—the result of my head swinging round in a half circle after Fosworthy grabbed me. The loose skin of the throat must have caught on a pointed stalagmite. The check possibly prevented a fracture of the skull, for, as it was, my jaw had thumped against rock hard enough to knock out a tooth.
The Courtesy of Death Page 7
