Slowly the hand she had lifted in warning fell to her side, and holding up the lamp as before, she turned away, and preceded me along the galleries. I followed her, perplexed, half angry, half alarmed. I began to fear that I was the sport of a mad woman. And then a new fancy seized me. Perhaps I myself might be delirious, and the mine, the endless galleries, and my strange guide, were visions of a disordered brain, a frightful dream, from which I vainly strove to awake. Presently, it occurred to me for the first time that my new-found friend’s feet made no sound as they trod the broken and rugged pavement, slippery and heaped with rubbish. Certain it was that she moved firmly and swiftly on, without any sign of difficulty or fatigue, while I stumbled and splashed, splashed and stumbled, and at times found it hard to keep up with her. But as regarded the noiselessness of her tread, I could not solve the doubt If I stopped, she stopped too, not after a pause, but instantly. And I heard nothing but my own labouring breath and hacking cough, and the sound of my own weary feet crunching the splinters of salt.
A little while, and even this was forgotten in a new source of apprehension. I had for some time vaguely conceived the idea that, as in a labyrinth, we were walking in a circle; and gradually I began to fancy that I had seen this or that block of salt or darkling arch before, and that I had passed through some of the corridors at least once before. But suspicion was changed to certainty when I suddenly espied, lying on the ground in one of the galleries, one of my own gloves. I had dropped this glove some time before, for I had missed it soon after the arrival of the Unknown. As I picked it up, I glanced keenly around me, and thought I recognised the opening that led into the square chamber. I was right; in another moment I had followed my mysterious guide into the square chamber itself. More than an hour’s weary toil, for my candle was all but spent, had brought us back to the point from which we had started. I was angry at last; all my involuntary awe for my strange conductress was lost, and I stamped my foot hard upon the floor as I asked if she had been amusing herself at my expense, or whether she, too, were ignorant of the topography of the mine, and had misled me by accident. I spoke in wrath, and almost in menace; but there was no reply, save one long moan, as from a child in pain, that rang sadly through the vault. I turned my head, but I could see nothing; and when I again confronted what I now deemed my treacherous guide, a sort of mist seemed to dim my eyes, and I saw, or thought I saw, her form grow faint and indistinct, fading and fading like breath upon a mirror, but with still the same calm face, the same grave look of sorrow and warning, until that too faded, and nothing was left opposite to me—nothing but the rocky wall. I sprang forward, incredulous, and touched the wall with my hand. As I did so, a repetition of the moaning cry made me start, and far down the passage where I had seen her first, I saw her again—the pure, pale outline of the young face, the tall, slender form in the grey mantle, with the hood drawn over the head, the lamp shining in the outstretched hand. How came she there?
“This is too much!” cried I passionately, and convinced that I was the victim of a trick, though how such a trick could have been effected, I did not care to consider. “I will not bear this juggling. I will not—”
As I spoke, I darted forward to overtake the receding figure, and my foot tripping among the loose stones of the floor, as I ran, I fell heavily, crushing the lantern beneath me, and being instantly involved in Egyptian darkness. Bruised and hurt, I gave no heed to the pain of the fall, but sprang up, and strained my eyes in the direction where the lamp had been last seen. There was not a spark—not a sound. No light, no rustle of her dress, no faint sound of a distant footfall, nothing but darkness and silence. Eagerly I listened, eagerly I watched, but in vain. I tried to call aloud, but my tongue refused its office; and when I did raise a weak shout, I felt my natural repugnance to the darkness deepen as no answer came.
“She is doing this to frighten me,” I murmured; “she is hiding behind some pillar. Whoever she is, she never could be cruel enough to leave me here in the dark alone, to perish.”
Silence, still silence. Any sound, even that moan, at which my very heartstrings had quivered, would have been better than that. Darkness, blank, blank darkness. I tried to shout, tried to grope my way out, but the sides of the rocky vault were slippery to the touch, and when I found an opening, I stumbled and fell again, and had not strength to rise. Oh, it was very cold, cold and dark. This must be death.
* * * *
“A drop more brandy, Jem; the last did him good, I can’t feel any pulse yet, though. Don’t crowd so about him, lads. Give him air! That’s enough of the brandy, but don’t leave off chafing the hands. He’ll come round!”
With my dulled ear, I heard these words, but scarcely understood them, and from between the half-closed lids my weak eyes could feebly distinguish a glare of torches, and several rough men in miners’ garb, and one in black with a kind, shrewd face—the doctor, no doubt. I saw all his, in a stupid sort of indifferent way, as if it had been a pageant, and then I seemed to sink down into a black sea of roaring water, and fainted for the second time.
I was in bed at last. I had been in bed some days, very ill, and with a brain too deadened, and a frame too exhausted, to take note of time. When my senses returned, I asked what was the date, and hearing it, knew that the Astarte had sailed without me, and that my passage-money was lost. It was not for weeks, and until my slow convalescence had ripened into recovery from the illness brought on by cold and the wetting I had experienced, that the doctor asked me how I came to separate myself from the rest of the company, and to get lost in the mine.
“It so happened,” said he, “that work was suspended unusually early on that day, as there was a wake at Swivelsby, and the miners had a sort of half-holiday by annual custom. The mine was therefore abandoned, and but for the lucky chance, that when you were missed at the inn, and inquiries were made, an intelligent boy, the son of a miner, declared that you had never come up to bank at all, it is probable that no search would have taken place. As it was, long hours passed before a party started in quest of you; and it is fortunate that they were in time. Setton Bassett mine has witnessed more than one tragic incident, even in my day.”
“To what do you allude, doctor?” asked I eagerly.
“Eighteen years ago, a young lady, a Miss Walcott, became separated from her friends, as you did, in that mine,” answered the doctor. “I had not as yet settled in the district, and only know the details from report, and very imperfectly. I believe, however, that the poor girl, who had made one of a large family party, was bound on a visit to an aunt who lived a few miles off; her own parents then residing at Hallings Court, near here. The day was a stormy one; the carriages drove off in a heavy fall of rain; and I believe the missing one was understood by her mother to be staying at her aunt’s, and vice versa, for there was no alarm till help was impossible. The poor girl’s body was found—for she perished of cold and hunger in that maze of galleries—in the very spot where we found you, and—Bless me, how pale you look, my dear sir. Take some cordial, and lie down, and no more talking—not a word more, I insist.”
I have no explanation of the above facts to offer. I have endeavoured, far from England, to set down every detail of the occurrence as simply and succinctly as possible. I should be thankful if I could disabuse my mind of the ghastly doubt and horror that cling to it, and which haunt me when I recall the events of that day in the Cheshire salt-mine. The good doctor, when he heard my statement, did his best to convince me that what I saw was a mere hallucination, due to my disordered health and excited nerves. I wish I could think so; but further inquiries, made before I left England, served to assure me that I was not the only person who was supposed to have seen the presence that I had beheld in the disused portion of the mine.
One word more. The warning was no idle one, though I doubt whether I should not have been ashamed to have heeded it, had not illness chained me to my sick-bed. Befor
e I was able to quit Setton Bassett, news came that the fine steamship Astarte had been cast away on the rocks of Cape Spartel, and that most of the crew and passengers had perished miserably in the surf.
H.P., by Sabine Baring-Gould
Originally published in 1904.
The river Vézère leaps to life among the granite of the Limousin, forms a fine cascade, the Saut de la Virolle, then after a rapid descent over mica-schist, it passes into the region of red sandstone at Brive, and swelled with affluents it suddenly penetrates a chalk district, where it has scooped out for itself a valley between precipices some two to three hundred feet high.
These precipices are not perpendicular, but overhang, because the upper crust is harder than the stone it caps; and atmospheric influences, rain and frost, have gnawed into the chalk below, so that the cliffs hang forward as penthouse roofs, forming shelters beneath them. And these shelters have been utilized by man from when the first occupants of the district arrived at a vastly remote period, almost uninterruptedly to the present day. When peasants live beneath these roofs of nature’s providing, they simply wall up the face and ends to form houses of the cheapest description of construction, with the earth as the floor, and one wall and the roof of living rock, into which they burrow to form cupboards, bedplaccs, and cellars.
The refuse of all ages is superposed, like the leaves of a book, one stratum above another in orderly succession. If we shear down through these beds, we can read the history of the land, so far as its manufacture goes, beginning at the present day and going down, down to the times of primeval man. Now, after every meal, the peasant casts down the bones he has picked, he does not stoop to collect and cast forth the sherds of a broken pot, and if a sou falls and rolls away, in the dust of these gloomy habitations it gets trampled into the soil, to form another token of the period of occupation.
When the first man settled here the climatic conditions were different. The mammoth or woolly elephant, the hyaena, the cave bear, and the reindeer ranged the land. Then naked savages, using only flint tools, crouched under these rocks. They knew nothing of metals and of pottery. They hunted and ate the horse; they had no dogs, no oxen, no sheep. Glaciers covered the centre of France, and reached down the Vézère valley as far as to Brive.
These people passed away, whither we know not The reindeer retreated to the north, the hyena to Africa, which was then united to Europe. The mammoth became extinct altogether.
After long ages another people, in a higher condition of culture, but who also used flint tools and weapons, appeared on the scene, and took possession of the abandoned rock shelters. They fashioned their implements in a different manner by flaking the flint in place of chipping it. They understood the art of the potter. They grew flax and wove linen. They had domestic animals, and the dog had become the friend of man. And their flint weapons they succeeded in bringing to a high polish by incredible labour and perseverance.
Then came in the Age of Bronze, introduced from abroad, probably from the East, as its great depot was in the basin of the Po. Next arrived the Gauls, armed with weapons of iron. They were subjugated by the Romans, and Roman Gaul in turn became a prey to the Goth and the Frank. History has begun and is in full swing.
The medieval period succeeded, and finally the modern age, and man now lives on top of the accumulation of all preceding epochs of men and stages of civilization. In no other part of France, indeed of Europe, is the story of man told so plainly, that he who runs may read; and ever since the middle of last century, when this fact was recognized, the district has been studied, and explorations have been made there, some slovenly, others scientifically.
A few years ago I was induced to visit this remarkable region and to examine it attentively. I had been furnished with letters of recommendation from the authorities of the great Museum of National Antiquities at St German, to enable me to prosecute my researches unmolested by over-suspicious gendarmes and ignorant mayors.
Under one overhanging rock was a cabaret or tavern, announcing that wine was sold there, by a withered bush above the door.
The place seemed to me to be a probable spot for my exploration. I entered into an arrangement with the proprietor to enable me to dig, he stipulating that I should not undermine and throw down his walls. I engaged six labourers, and began proceedings by driving a tunnel some little way below the tavern into the vast bed of debris.
The upper series of deposits did not concern me much. The point I desired to investigate, and if possible to determine, was the approximate length of time that had elapsed between the disappearance of the reindeer hunters and the coming on the scene of the next race, that which used polished stone implements and had domestic animals.
Although it may seem at first sight as if both races had been savage, as both lived in the Stone Age, yet an enormous stride forward had been taken when men had learned the arts of weaving, of pottery, and had tamed the dog, the horse, and the cow. These new folk had passed out of the mere wild condition of the hunter, and had become pastoral and to some extent agricultural.
Of course, the data for determining the length of a period might be few, but I could judge whether a very long or a very brief period had elapsed between the two occupations by the depth of debris—chalk fallen from the roof, brought down by frost, in which were no traces of human workmanship.
It was with this distinct object in view that I drove my adit into the slope of rubbish some way below the cabaret, and I chanced to have hit on the level of the deposits of the men of bronze. Not that we found much bronze—all we secured was a broken pin—but we came on fragments of pottery marked with the chevron and nail and twisted thong ornament peculiar to that people and age.
My men were engaged for about a week before we reached the face of the chalk cliff. We found the work not so easy as I had anticipated. Masses of rock had become detached from above and had fallen, so that we had either to quarry through them or to circumvent them. The soil was of that curious coffee colour so inseparable from the chalk formation. We found many things brought down from above, a coin commemorative of the storming of the Bastille, and some small pieces of the later Roman emperors. But all of these were, of course, not in the solid ground below, but near the surface.
When we had reached the face of the cliff, instead of sinking a shaft I determined on carrying a gallery down an incline, keeping the rock as a wall on my right, till I reached the bottom of all.
The advantage of making an incline was that there was no hauling up of the earth by a bucket let down over a pulley, and it was easier for myself to descend.
I had not made my tunnel wide enough, and it was tortuous. When I began to sink, I set two of the men to smash up the masses of fallen chalk rock, so as to widen the tunnel, so that I might use barrows. I gave strict orders that all the material brought up was to be picked over by two of the most intelligent of the men, outside in the blaze of the sun. I was not desirous of sinking too expeditiously; I wished to proceed slowly, cautiously, observing every stage as we went deeper.
We got below the layer in which were the relics of the Bronze Age and of the men of polished stone, and then we passed through many feet of earth that rendered nothing, and finally came on the traces of the reindeer period.
To understand how that there should be a considerable depth of the debris of the men of the rude stone implements, it must be explained that these men made their hearths on the bare ground, and feasted around their fires, throwing about them the bones they had picked, and the ashes, and broken and disused implements, till the ground was inconveniently encumbered. Then they swept all the refuse together over their old hearth, and established another on top. So the process went on from generation to generation.
For the scientific results of my exploration I must refer the reader to the journals and memoirs of learned societies. I will not trouble him with them here.
On the ninth day after we had come to the face of the cliff and when we had reached a considerable depth, we uncovered some human bones. I immediately adopted special precautions, so that these should not be disturbed. With the utmost care the soil was removed from over them, and it took us half a day to completely clear a perfect skeleton. It was that of a full-grown man, lying on his back, with the skull supported against the wall of chalk rock. He did not seem to have been buried. Had he been so, he would doubtless have been laid on his side in a contracted posture, with the chin resting on the knees.
One of the men pointed out to me that a mass of fallen rock lay beyond his feet, and had apparently shut him in, so that he had died through suffocation, buried under the earth that the rock had brought down with it.
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack Page 46
