So his progress became slow, and his early hopes of a quick passage to the marvels that he hoped lay ahead were lost in the sweat and toil of pressing forward. The tunnel was not so deep in the ground as the big communal one from which he had started, and had a more temporary air about it, and somehow, somewhere, lost the awesome sense of the past he had felt initially.
This feeling was accentuated by the fact that the marvellous richness of sound in the earlier tunnel was muffled and lost in the confusion of roof-fall and roots he was battling through. He began to feel isolated and cut off in a way he had not felt before, and to have a sense that he was lost for ever in the ruins of a system that was now empty of life and interest.
So strong did this feeling become that more than once he was tempted to burrow up to the surface and press on across it to a point where the Ancient System might have more to offer. Only his desire truly to explore the Ancient System, coupled with a real fear of the dangers from predators on the open surface above him, kept him pressing on through the ruined tunnel. Until finally, and suddenly, he was tired. His left shoulder grew aching and heavy, throbbing where the wound had been, while the sounds in the tunnel seemed to fade and swell, whirling in a dizzy way about him, so that he knew he must rest.
He chose one of the many subsidiary runs off the tunnel he had been going down and found a small burrow a few moleyards into it. It was dusty and infiltrated from above by the white fronds of roots, but at least it gave him a floor on which to sleep and a secure roof over his head. But he was too fatigued to fall into sleep immediately, dozing instead, while listening to the muffled sounds about him.
If he fell asleep, he did not notice it, for he awoke with a start and the crystal-clear conviction that the sound about him was different from any sound he had heard before in the Ancient System. It had a depth and resonance that suggested… that said… he couldn’t say what. He could hear, but he could not put words to it. But he was suddenly afraid in a way he had never known before—a fear not of possible hurt to his body, but of some wonder, some depth, that once felt or seen would strip away something from him and leave a routeway of vulnerability running to his very soul.
But just as a pup may often face some danger so enormous that he cannot even comprehend it and innocently stand before it like an anemone in a gale, so Bracken now only briefly acknowledged this fear. He shook himself awake, got up, and was off down the tunnel with renewed excitement, convinced that the most gruelling part of the journey was over and that the deeper sound ahead heralded a discovery that would take him at last to the heart of the system.
He was right. The tunnel began to enter a harder chalk subsoil and to drop down to still and ancient depths where all windsound began to fade, to be replaced by strange distant creakings and groanings.
The tunnel ran deeper and deeper and then levelled off, the floor covered by dust and grime that had been disturbed by no creature for generations. The sound of his pawsteps was muffled by dust, and when he scratched his claws along the wall, the sound travelled ahead but did not echo back, rather losing itself in some great void at the end of the tunnel. He soon found out why. The tunnel emerged into a chamber, the size of which took Bracken’s breath away. It was so big that had his paws not been on solid ground, he might have thought he was floating in space itself. The chamber was full of the mysterious creakings and strainings he had heard before, coming from its far side. The walls actually stretched ruggedly to his right and left but appeared to stretch in a straight line and not in the curve he was used to from other big chambers he had been in. A curving wall, after all, suggests that a place has confines. A straight wall in a chamber hints at massive size.
Bracken crouched down in the protection of his little tunnel entrance and began to feel his way mentally into the place. Its roof soared so high above him that its height seemed even further off than its unknown, unseen walls. He let out a brief call to test the echo, and it travelled away from him, falling into silence until he had almost given it up before far, far from the distance, the echo returned, small and lorn. As he was thinking about what this meant another echo came back from his call, this time from somewhere high above him. Then finally one more, from way off to the right.
He explored first to the right and then around the perimeter to the left, stopping in each case only when he reached either end of the massive wall that towered darkly on the far side of the chamber.
The wall cast fear into him, for it was curiously carved, with great swirling crevices and jagged embossments that gave it an eerie power to distort and amplify any sound that came up against it. The sound of Bracken’s pawfalls became the tramp, tramp, tramp of an army of great moles, causing him to peer furtively about him in the dark to see if these phantoms were really there. An intake of breath became a dark gasp of horror so convincing that it made him feel the fear it sounded like. As for a hum, which he tried, that turned into the deep chant of dark and malevolent moles.
Such was the power of these echoes or sounds that Bracken was at first reluctant to progress to its very centre. But as it was from that murky and unseen depth that the creakings and stressings that vibrated about the chamber came, he knew that finally he would have to penetrate into it.
He thought about what he had found. Three tunnels on one side of the chamber, three on the other, all radiating to different parts of the system. Six in all, not counting the tiny tunnel that had led him here, and which he suspected had been burrowed in secret as a special way for somemole, or moles, in the past. Six tunnels. Was there, then, a seventh, leading through to the Stone clearing which must surely lie beyond this great embossed wall, and which must lie further along it?
Slowly he set off, stepping out several moleyards from the wall so he could see ahead just a little better, and so his hums would not be quite so powerful.
The sounds, when he briefly created them by a tentative hum—he did not want to provoke the same reaction as before—now evoked a feeling of vulnerable good spirits in him, less jerky than before but quite without the smooth gentleness of the first set of sounds. He felt that at any moment they would take him plummeting down to misery again, and stopped humming, though it was difficult to stop the feeling continuing and changing as he went on. He looked at the wall, whose carvings were clear but getting more complex again, the lines spiralling and looping from ground to shoulder height and sometimes beyond.
He tried humming louder to see what would happen, and what happened was not pleasant. The sound had a dark quality to it. At first it was distant, coming from somewhere high up the wall some way beyond, hanging off the overhang and easily forgotten if he concentrated on the more pleasant sounds that came to him straight off the wall. But this became harder the further he went, and, despite himself and his fear of being caught up again in dark sound, he continued to hum so that the darkness in the sound grew blacker and its lightness fled behind him to where the more melodious patterns and wall carvings were. This black sound began to overwhelm him and he began to push and stagger forward as if losing his sense of direction, trying to catch up with his breath and stop his own throat sending out these unnatural sounds that pulled him onwards and on.