The advantage of such air currents to a mole who knows them is that they allow him to ‘read’ his tunnels in two directions at once, and sometimes, if he is at an intersection or crosstunnel, even more.
At first Bracken could not easily interpret the sounds he heard or the scents either. That would take time. Though from the scents he could tell that there were no moles about, nor did he expect any. There were, however, other animal smells—voles, certainly, but they’d grab any temporary burrow they could get, and if that included the entrance to a deserted mole tunnel, well and good; the more sinister, sharp smell of weasel came to him, too, though from a long, long way off; but nothing else that was specific, except for the clean, dry smell of fresh vegetation whose roots and scent he realised must enter the Ancient System in many places.
This play on his ears and snout was intoxicating enough, but the impression of the great tunnel he was in was only completed by its awesome size and evident age. Its wall and roof towered above him, giving the immediate impression that it had been burrowed in some long-distant age, when giant moles roamed the earth. The walls were hard and a little chalky, the floors smooth and well packed, while the curves of its roof and corners, and where subsidiary tunnels joined it, were subtle and sinewy.
Set into the walls at irregular intervals were the grey-white roundels of enormous flints, plump with curves and hollows, which added not only to the curious flowing appearance of the tunnels but created a feeling of great antiquity as well.
It occurred to Bracken how extraordinary it was that moles had been able to move these great stones so that they might fit the tunnel—so deliberate did their setting seem—but then he saw that, by some miracle of orientation, the tunnel had been burrowed to fit the existing position of the stones. It was as if, in some way, the ancient moles had taken their cue not from any desire to impose a pattern on virgin soil but from the pattern set by whatever power it was that had first placed the stones. The feeling of age and venerability the tunnel gave him was such that he almost tiptoed along so he wouldn’t disturb the ancient peace.
What he did disturb, however, was the deposit of fine white chalk dust that had settled through time on the floor and rougher parts of the walls. The first big drift he came to he mistook for a rise in the floor, and went unthinking into it so that particles rose about him in a great choking cloud of dust, and he backed away from it, sneezing and gasping, his fur all white.
After that, he watched carefully for the thicker drifts, gradually getting used to the fact that the chalk tended to be deposited on alternate sides of the great tunnel, creating a winding path of clearer floor down the centre of the tunnel—which added to the impression the tunnel gave to a mole travelling down it of dancing or weaving along past the immovable stones of time.
Bracken did not enter any of the subsidiary tunnels that ran off this bigger tunnel on his first two days of exploration. He was too tired and too cautious. His explorations of the Westside, Barrow Vale and the slopes in May and June had taught him that exploration is best done carefully until a mole has a grasp of the orientation of the tunnels accessible from it.
He quickly established that what he had come to regard as the peripheral communal tunnel of the Ancient System ran, at this point anyway, parallel with the cliff’s edge and roughly one hundred moleyards in from it. It ran on up towards the top of the hill where he and Hulver had lain hidden before Midsummer Night, and back down towards the easternmost side of the slopes. There was only one other tunnel running back to the cliff’s edge as did the first one he had found himself in—and this, too, fell sheer to the void below.
On the third day of his new exploration, Bracken travelled a little way down one of the tunnels that branched off towards the centre of the Ancient System, which was the part he most wanted to reach. The tunnel was smaller than the communal one from which it led out, just as elegantly burrowed, and flints still lined its walls.
He was only a few moleyards into it when he saw ahead of him the well-rounded entrance into a burrow. He approached with heart beating rapidly and breath held, for in any system it is the burrows that bring home the fact that moles actually once lived and ate, slept and fought there. He entered it a little nervously, automatically sniffing at the entrance for the scent of life, though he knew that there could be none there. The burrow was bigger than those in the present system, and oval instead of round. Its soil was the same grey-white of the tunnels, the walls were smooth and held no flints, and on its floor lay the dusty fibres of some long-since-perished nesting material. The whole effect was sparse and cold, and try as he might, he could not imagine moles living there in some past time; he felt the age of the burrow, but no warm sense of its past life.
It was the same further on—the same oval burrow, the same sparseness, the same disappointing inability to reach back to the moles who must once have lived there. Quite what Bracken expected he didn’t know, but ever since he had first heard of the Ancient System the idea of its past life had excited his imagination. Now he was here—well, he wanted more than he could have.
He explored down all the subsidiary tunnels leading towards the centre of the wood, which were within reach of the base he had established for himself in his original tunnel. He gradually got used to the rich sound and by association and deduction was able to start to interpret it. At the same time, and without knowing it, he built up his strength again so that when he was ready for more ambitious exploration, he was fit enough for it as well.
It was the second week of August when he made the decision to press forwards to where he reckoned the centre of the system would be, and not try and return in one day but to make do with whatever burrow he could find. By now, the great communal tunnel that had so impressed him at the start was familiar, its curves and twists still mysterious and beautiful, but the initial awe he had felt was replaced by a certain proprietorial confidence. He felt there was nothing more it could tell him and that having conquered it, so to speak, he might as well move on to better things.
With this dangerously complacent attitude, Bracken left what was in fact no more than the periphery of the Ancient System and struck westwards towards its very centre. He took the biggest of the subsidiary tunnels and, ignoring all side turns and burrow entrances, pressed on down it, anxious to see if he could find something like a centre to the system.
Bracken’s sense of direction was, as ever, very accurate, for the tunnel went directly west towards where he was certain the Stone itself stood.
However, he was over-optimistic about the speed he would make, for after two or three hundred moleyards, the tunnel’s condition deteriorated rapidly as it sloped upwards nearer the surface and entered an area of softer, blacker soil. There were frequent roof-falls to burrow through; they had cascaded down in the long-distant past and opened the way for superficial vegetation to send down its roots, winding and confused, into what had once been a perfect tunnel. At the same time, the roots of trees impinged on the tunnel, sometimes sending a root shaft vertically through it, so that he had to squeeze his way past, while more than once, an old root ran along the tunnel itself, melding into the soil around it and losing the tunnel in a debris of mould that he did not much like burrowing through.