Other Earths (collection)

“The next morning I rendered myself at the top of the pit, at a distance from the farmhouse of two leagues or else some miles—I will give these measurements in the English fashion, as they were explained to me. We crossed over the stile of fence rails that blocked our way and continued down the ravine at a distance of a hundred feet below the surface of the plain. On each side of the dry streambed we found oak trees and chestnuts, as well as elms and maples and a proliferation of vines and brambles, in all a far greater variety than anything to be found up on the flat. When I remarked on this, my companions first explained to me one of the enduring mysteries of this place, which as we sank down appeared more and more dismal and terrible to me, darker and colder, though it was a bright, hot morning when I left Madame Mylecraine’s farm. There is a wind that issues back and forth out of the cave, as if from a bellows or the lips of a stone giant, a breath that is most healthful and bountiful. Consumptive patients, I was told, after all hope was abandoned, could take up residence in the mouth of the Vestibule and be cured in a matter of days. This was first reported in the days of the last war, because the floors of the first galleries are rich in nitre, which is used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Even now we could see the remnants of the abandoned works, while the guides told us stories of their uncles or fathers who had emerged from the pit with their backs straight and their eyes keen, their ponies glossy and well-tempered. I thought at first they were deceiving me.

“But now we stood on a grassy terrace above the entrance, a steep descent to the black arch, choked with planks and timbers, while water dripped down from above. And for the first time I could feel the cold, sepulchral blast, while I watched the swallows dart through the thin water, and at the same time I listened to our commander, Captain Douglas Sharpe, as he explained our tasks. There were twenty-five of us, divided into groups of five.

“Now we also received our iron torches and a bucket of lard among each group. We filled our canteens from the brook and primed our pistols. But we could not light the swinging lanterns in the wind until we had descended beneath the great portal and sixty paces into the cave itself. Here the roof was just a foot above my head. The passage was constricted by a wall built by the miners, leaving only a narrow door. The wind blew like a winter storm, and we must grope forward in the dark. A few feet beyond the wall, the air was calm and still.

“Here we lit our lamps and pressed forward in single file. We stayed in this low, narrow corridor for perhaps a quarter of a mile until it opened out into the Vestibule, a round chamber perhaps two hundred feet across, and the ceiling sixty feet above our heads. Black buttresses of stone jutted from the shadowy walls. Our party of twenty-five had seemed sufficient in the narrow entrance to the cave. But as we pressed forward into the Grand Gallery we seemed small and few. We picked our way among the leaching vats and wooden pipes. We skirted mounds of excavated earth, while for the first time I gave credence to the stories I had heard outside, that the miners in their excavations had disturbed a cemetery of gigantic corpses, ten feet long. It was easy to imagine giants in this place, and to imagine also the ghostly presence of the aboriginal inhabitants of North America, specters from the more recent past.

“As it turned out, this was no idle speculation. Because of it, I was able to find our quarry where the rest failed. For by the light of my swinging torch I descried piles of blackened rushes and abandoned canes, which the Cherokees had used to light their way. As we spread out into the side passages—the Haunted Chambers, as they are called, and the Bridges with their gleaming stalactites—I found myself looking always for these traces that, though ephemeral, seemed more trustworthy (I don’t know why!) than the arrows marked in chalk to indicate the correct route or warn me from the brink of some precipice or pit. At the same time it occurred to me what in some fashion I must already have known, that Leon Benbourgisse and his accomplices must have another means of egress from the cave. Else they could not fail to be taken in the Narrows.