By Paul Mirabile
Arthur was a secretive lad, a strapping boy of alcoves and copses, of coombs and chasms … of shadows. He had no friends nor at school, neither in the neighbourhood. His extraordinary imagination provided him all that he required to communicate with the marvels of the world.
It was early spring, and unseasonably warm. After school, Arthur would rush up to his room to examine, over and over again, maps of the world and his large globe, which he turned ever so slowly, scrutinizing all latitudes and longitudes. The sixteen-year-old boy had been brewing a remarkable idea for months, and now would be the time for that idea to take a definite form: Dig a tunnel from his village that would lead him diagonally to Australia! The idea had struck him like a lightning bolt. It seemed perfectly feasible as he spun that globe round and round. He would have to tunnel southwards to the asthenosphere[1], then veer eastwards. It would take a year… No! Perhaps years. But it could be done…
For now, however, certain preliminaries had to be dispensed with: locating the exact place to start digging without being seen, concealing the tools, the ladder, the dug up dirt. Yes, it was quite a lofty programme that required organisation and determination.
He looked beyond the meadow from his upstairs room window, over the rye fields and into the thick woods where hidden in the thickets lay a seventeenth century cemetery into which no one ever ventured. That would be the perfect location to start his tunnel. His father had all that he needed; that is, a pickaxe, a shovel and a bucket. As to the dirt, he would just scatter that about the woods or fill in the plots that had long since sunken deep with their fallen, crumbling tombstones. Arthur wasn’t afraid of the dead, nor of their ghosts.
To put his journey into action he needed time, and above all, the utmost secrecy. No one must guess his intentions, especially not his parents. On Monday after school, Arthur went out on reconnaissance. He changed his clothes and trotted into the woods beyond the meadow. In the abandoned cemetery, he began searching for a place to dig. He strolled in and out of the tombstones amusing himself by reading the epitaphs on the cracked tombs, most of them having been written in Latin. Huge, yawning holes filled with weeds and yellow grass could be possible candidates for the digging, but … Arthur stopped dead in his tracks.
Behind a copse of sycamores and weeping willows, he spied out a low stone structure that appeared to be an old, village well. And indeed it was! He had never seen it before. A well rigged out with a rusting hand crank and bucket to boot. When he bent over the coping, he noted that iron rungs ran down the mossy side of it which, undoubtedly, served as a ladder. The coping had been broken on two sides, but there seemed no danger of it further crumbling. He peeked down, the bottom appeared dry. Arthur drew back in great excitement, for if the well were deep enough, how much time and energy he could save ! This was surely a good omen. Still, he would need to climb down with a torch to inspect the bottom. Arthur cringed at the thought of rats or other rodents of the subterranean world. He would just have to muster all the courage he possessed. He felt like dancing. And indeed he did, in and out of the sinking tombstones. What a wonderful beginning to his adventure, to his voyage to the centre of the Earth … and beyond to the lands of kangaroos and koala bears.
The adventurer wasted not a moment. The next day, and the many more that followed, after school he would change, pack a clean shirt and trousers, gloves and sneakers in a backpack so that after his digging he could change his boots and work clothes before returning home. He hid the pickaxe and small shovel in the woods near the well, knowing perfectly well that his father, a rather absent-minded man, would never miss them. In fact, his father never had any need for them since he used the tools at the construction site.
As Arthur thought, the iron rungs proved to be sturdy. Equipped with his helmet, onto which he had strapped a torch, he descended into the well, mindful not to touch the moss or slime. At first, the horrible stench of rats or of their urine caused him to retch, but he got used to that.
The bottom, clayey, showed no signs of water, so he inspected the fractured stones of the sides following the needle of his compass, which slowly swung to a south-easterly direction, and there broke through the stone easy enough, picking and shovelling away the earth. Every half-hour or so he would fill the well-bucket, climb the rungs and pull it up with the hand crank. It was laboriously boring and tiresome work but better than carrying that bucket up and down those rungs.
Day after day, month after month, alone in his underground solitude, Arthur banged away at the brittle earth, carving out a tunnel into which he could easily crawl until seven o’clock in the evening. To tell the truth, the going was easier than expected. He would leave the tools in the tunnel (who would ever find them?), climb up, change into his ‘dinner clothes’ and return home, where his parents would be preparing their meal. He would run upstairs, jump into the shower (his fingernails were black with soil) and saunter down to join them at the table. The usual conversation ensued: How was school ? Where had he been the whole afternoon ? Had he any homework … and so on and so forth.
Everyday Arthur trained his mind and body to adopt to this new adventure, however arduous and lonely. His body grew leaner and muscular, his face taunt. His parents admired their son, who seemed to be in brighter spirits the past few months, more pleasant at the dining table, more affectionate, too, in the evening while chatting. His gradual metamorphosis truly surprised them, although his father couldn’t quite understand why the bright summer sunshine hadn’t tanned his son’s manly face ! But being a discreet father he never enquired about this unusual pallor.
After seven months of tunnelling, Arthur observed that the underworld temperature had risen considerably. His breathing grew erratic, oftentimes accompanied by bouts of coughing, even retching. Was he still in the Earth’s lithosphere, some forty-five miles thick ? The increase in the pressure and density of the air worked its way into and through his aching muscles and bones. His mind drifted to the upper world: the singing birds, the blue skies when it wasn’t raining, the fresh, cool breezes … Here, in the underworld all he heard were the screeching of rats and at times a deep, rumbling sound, hollow, unidentifiable.
One day as he toiled with much difficulty, hammering through a layer of granite, he discovered a coin. It was a two pence with the effigy of a queen, and on the reverse side a plume of ostrich feathers with a coronet. He smiled. It was his first underworld gratification. He would investigate the origins of his find more closely when back in his room. Which he did with much zeal. Arthur learned from a numismatic entry in his encyclopaedia that this coin dated from the 1970s, composed of bronze, copper and zinc. The head was that of Queen Elizabeth the Second. He placed his prize delicately in a box, hiding it in a secret place lest his parents, by chance, should discover it.
As the Autumn months slid by, the whirling leaves had no effect on Arthur as he tunnelled and tunnelled, deeper and deeper, always in an easterly direction. And as he did, he discovered coins of the most extraordinary mint : A very rare 1937 Edward the Seventh brass three pence, three hammered coins from the seventeenth or fifteenth century called ‘Limas‘, during the reign of George the Second, two ‘Groats‘ from the fifteenth century from which Henry the Seventh gleamed perfectly visible. His box grew heavier and heavier with these extracted treasures whose wealth must have been estimable. Arthur’s excitement reached an apex when he scraped out of the extracted earth two imported coins of Frankish mint, a denier[2] and a sou[3]. Three days later, he added to his precious hoard a ‘Gold Slater’ whose effigy of Julius Caesar left him breathless.
Dreams of reaching the centre of the Earth visited his restless sleep every night now. He dreamed of encountering dwarves mining for gold, clinging to the walls of gigantic shafts tapping and hammering away. He dreamed of boring into enormous chambers glittering with sunny gems or sprouting with enormous mushrooms. One night he found himself on a deserted strand gasping at a vast ocean, out of whose fuming, stilled waters huge reptiles swam, whilst others lay bathing on the sunless sands. He would awake in a cold sweat. He had been reading too much of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Winter. Arthur crunched over a frosty bed of snow ‘back to work’. The weather had become terribly cold in the ‘upperworld’, whereas in the ‘lowerworld’, Arthur’s world, temperatures had become almost unbearable. How deep had he dug ? The outer crust of the Earth measured some 3,400 miles. His digging, shovelling, climbing up and down the rungs had become so laborious. At times he lay down flat on his belly in the damp tunnel and sobbed. Arthur reckoned that it would take years and years of unending toil to reach the centre of the Earth like his Jules Verne hero, much less the lands of kangaroos and koala bears. His spirits brightened, though, when he dug up three ‘Henistbury Head’ coins dating from 150 B.C., no doubt imported from Roman Gaul. They had been in circulation in England since the times of the Keltic tribes living in Dorset and Somerset, so he learned from a numismatic magazine he had recently purchased. In spite of this cheery event, the days went by rather drearily.
Then the miracle occurred! Banging away listlessly into the bleak and black airless universe in which he was engulfed, his shovel broke through a thin layer of sand sediment which tumbled into a pocket of emptiness. Arthur carved out a hole large enough to crawl through and lo and behold he found himself in a tunnel; a vast tunnel high enough to stand in, wide enough for two, even three men to walk abreast ! It must be a miner’s tunnel– he thought, and with a burst of fatigued emotion, leapt for joy. A miracle! A miracle!
How many miles would he gain? How many extracted buckets saved? How much energy economized? He could now walk, even trot if he felt so inclined. And the tunnel led downwards, deeper and deeper into the Earth. He checked his compass, not only deeper to the South, but also veering to the East. The work had been done for him.
Arthur checked his watch ; he still had an hour or two, although with Winter, night fell early. None the less, he had to explore this miracle a bit more before crawling back to the well. Which he did, jogging along, leaping now and then, inspecting the wooden framework of the tunnel, rotting here, split there, but still solid. He stopped in his tracks : At his feet lay a yellowing, rat pellet-filled newspaper : “The Dundee Evening Telegraph?” he queried aloud. Odd, there was no echo here. He shouted. Nothing. Shrugging his shoulders, he picked up the paper and put it in his backpack to be examined once in his room. He spun on his heels and hurried back to the well: running, crawling and climbing.
As expected, his older sister came home for the Christmas holidays from university. Arthur was jolly glad to see her but said nothing of his subterranean adventure. That must never be revealed to anyone, even to his sister whom he loved very much, and in whom he had always confided his most intimate secrets. He chose to take a rest for that week; he had earned a bit of a holiday, and after all, the miners’ tunnel would save him days, even months of labour. That night when alone, he checked the newspaper found in the tunnel: 1934. Incredible. A miner must have packed his lunch in it.
When the festivities had ended and his sister had departed Arthur returned to his timeless underworld. The mine was longer than he imagined. He walked on and on and on, descending ever deeper, the heat oppressing him, compressing him. He laughed nervously: Would he stumble upon Smeagol or Gollum frantically searching for his ‘precious’ (ring), or Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit, he, frantically searching for a way out of his underworld impasse? Or a dragon’s lair, where the hoary creature lay upon its hoard of gold? At times he swore he heard the gnomic chanting of bearded dwarves, their rhyming tunes. He laughed and laughed at these imagined airs. Was he to become a dwarf, too … Or a Hobbit, lost in the dark, inventing riddles?
The air became thinner and thinner, his head lighter and lighter. He laughed and laughed. His dreamy thoughts wandered to his parents, completely unaware of his underworld activities, to his teachers, who marvelled at his good scores in history, geography and natural science. He laughed and laughed. How many hours at night had he pored over the history of his treasured coins, their minting and circulation? How many hours had he studied the layers of the Earth, its rock formations? He had scored the highest marks in his class! His parents were so proud of him, a bit sceptical at first, but none the less, proud. They had always favoured his sister, indeed highly intelligent, more intelligent than him. Perhaps they would now consider him ‘university material’ like his sister. Perhaps. But who really cared! And he laughed and laughed as he walked and trotted.
He must have reached the asthenosphere at this time because seams of sand sediment, roan red, broke through the rotting frame beams as he trained his torchlight on them. Yet, according to his research this meant that the temperatures would be ranging at 900 degrees ! Impossible. It was the last layer, some 250 miles wide and 1, 700 miles from the Earth’s crust. Could he have come that far into Mother Earth ? He shuddered at the thought and broke out into peals of hysterical laughter. So much laughter that he began to cry. Hot tears rolled abundantly down his dirty, hairless cheeks. He heard the plump-bellied rats screech around him and covered his ears.
Arthur walked on and on in sluggish footfalls imagining himself in Australia without having had to fly or sail. His head spun, and as it did frightful images of underworld creatures passed before his puffy, red eyes. Breathing had become a toilsome effort, whilst his heart beat at rapid paces. Suddenly Arthur’s torchlight fell upon a mass of rock. The tunnel had come to an abrupt end!
He stood face to face with seams of sediment stone, dull green. He listlessly took out his compass: The digger would have to renew his digging, slightly to the right. This very plain and painful fact soured his spirits. But at least he would not have to fill bucket after bucket with extracted earth ; he had only to shovel it out and throw it into the miners’ tunnel. That, at least, was somewhat of a compensation. He checked his watch, three more hours. So he set immediately to work, albeit with unenthusiastic, torpid strokes of his pickaxe, so heavy his limbs had grown, so hot the temperature had risen, so thin the air had become.
As he picked away in a slow-motion dream state, he saw himself near the liquid core of the Earth. What would he find: A vast ocean or sea? But that was 1, 700 miles deep under the crust of the Earth. Nonsense. He had lost all track of measured miles, of time … of reality. The digging, however, was easy enough, the earth dripping with humidity and somewhat sandy. “It must be the lower mantle of the asthenosphere,” he whispered as if not to disturb the spirits of the underworld. One last stroke before retiring for the day.
Besides, he had an examination in mathematics in the morning and had to go over his notes. He raised his pickaxe but there it remained in mid-air. Some weird noise caught his attention. He pressed his ear to the hot rocky earth; a distant swishing like a flush of bats unsettled him. He crawled back a bit then struck a blow to the rocky noise. Arthur gasped as a blast of hot air flushed his face rowan red. He screamed in pain, crawling backwards, rubbing his face with a gloved hand. The tunnel filled with steaming air, followed shortly by blasts of scolding water which sent the boy tumbling over and over. He rolled and floundered about in the tremendous rush of hot, scalding water. They were driving him towards the miners’ tunnel at incredible speed. He could hardly keep his head above the flow; a flow that scorched his chin and cheekbones.
His backpack was borne along with the rush as were hundreds and hundreds of rats or other creatures of the underworld, for he heard their high, pathetic screeches above the precipitating din. Keeping his head above the rolling flood he was propelled into the miners’ tunnel where he managed to get to his feet.
Arthur grabbed his backpack and dragged his water-logged boots as quickly as he could towards the first tunnel, the rushing flow somewhat slackened by the steep upward inclination of the miners’ tunnel. A myriad of rats were scurrying on all sides of him, as if they were keeping pace with their underworld companion. Arthur, no longer frightened of them, but thinking only of his own salvation, pushed on upwards, the waters now swirling about his feet. They were gaining momentum. The boy fell several times, crying aloud, praying that he would get out alive. Then a terrible thought seized him: He was responsible for this disaster. For indeed it was a disaster! A terrible one indeed that no one was to know … No one ! But what would happen when the flow reached the well ? Arthur trembled at the very thought of it.
The boy slushed on and on as the now cooling waters rose to his ankles … to his calves. When he spotted the first tunnel, diving into it, he was literally crawling through torrents of a lukewarm current, whose incredible swiftness swung him from one side of the wall to another. Parts of the tunnel were now caving in. Screams rose in his throat, choking him, making him cry: Would he be buried alive through his own monstrous making? Why had he not consulted a speleologist before undertaking such a dangerous journey ? No ! All this had to remain his secret … for ever…
And poor Arthur bounced along with that current, gasping for breath, dog-paddling alongside rats, mice and moles. Hours and hours seemed to pass. His limbs weakend. His head bobbed above the flow like a cork. But there, just ahead, the salutary shaft of light of the well. Out he was flung like the cork of a champagne bottle into the miry clay of the pit. He scrambled for the trusty rungs, climbed frantically towards the palely lit sanctuary of the upperworld, taking a look now and then at the ever-rising waters bearing all the beasts of the underworld …
Arthur threw himself over the coping, took a last peek down at the slow but steady rise of the unleashed watery fury, then dashed into the cemetery to change his clothes. Indeed, his parents must not know anything about this mishap. He stood shivering in the failing light of evening. The greyish sky was so low. He felt drops on his feverish face. It was sleet or snow. “The pickaxe and shovel ?” he cried out in a tearful voice. “ Ah, who would ever find them ?” In the dim whitish glow he thought he espied tribes of rats streaming out over the coping, scurrying for safety into the woods. They too sought sanctuary in the light of the upper world, deprived now of the secure darkness of theirs … and his ? It was all so paradoxical.
Without further ado, Arthur made a bee-line for home. No light shone at any window. His parents must have been out. So much the better. He charged up to his room, into the shower to scrape the dirt and filth out of his fingernails and hair, put cream on his rowan-red face, then fell on his bed, exhausted, crying like a baby.
When his parents came home and noticed all the lights off in the sitting room, they mounted the stairway and knocked at Arthur’s door somewhat perplexed at the sullen atmosphere of the house. But there he was, their loving son, studiously going over his notes for the next morning’s mathematics examination. He smiled at them and they smiled back. How happy they were that Arthur took his schooling so seriously, his father, however, somewhat wary about the his son’s sunburnt face ! In early Spring ? Anyway, they were sure that he would be excellent ‘university material’ like his older sister. They closed the door quietly.
The next morning Arthur awoke to the disturbing sounds of fire engines and police sirens. Through his window he looked out over the meadow, the rye fields and into the thick woods where firemen, police and neighbours had gathered to witness and stave off the dark waters spiralling up from the abandoned village well… from some dark subterranean past into the greyish wee morning hours of the present.
[1] The layer of semi-molten rocks under the lithosphere
[2] A penny.
[3] A shilling.
Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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