A little farther on the roof came down again and I was bending low in a narrow, stuffy passage with the water round my ankles. Twenty yards or so farther on the tunnel ran out into a wider gallery that crossed it like a T-join. I switched my torch off as I looked out into this larger gallery. It was well that I did so, for not fifty yards up the straight, broad gallery to the right the light of a lamp showed the rock walls of a bend.
It surprised me that Manack hadn't got farther. But I didn't stop to think about that. I turned into the gallery and hurried after the subdued glow of his lamp. The floor of this gallery was much drier and sloped gently upwards. It was easy going, my mind had time to wonder what the hell Manack was up to. I would have expected him to go down to the Mermaid. That was the natural thing for him to do. That was where his precious lode was. But this way could only lead into the old part of the mine. I had kept my bearings — it was an entirely automatic reaction. And I knew that we were now going inland to the north of the main shaft. If he had kept straight on he would soon be in that part of Wheal Garth that narrowed and squeezed between Botallack and Come Lucky. At the thought of Come Lucky the hair prickled along my scalp. Come Lucky was full of water. Suppose the old man were going to blow a hole in Come Lucky?
All that weight of water would come flooding into Wheal Garth. That would stop his son's little scheme of letting the sea into the Mermaid.
I began to run. I had to keep close to him now. I had to see what he was up to. For all I knew he might have his charges fixed. He might be going to fuse them tonight. He'd do it at night. If he did it during the day, his son and Slim and Friar might be caught and overwhelmed in the Mermaid.
The gallery ahead suddenly became dark. I switched my torch on, shielding the beam with my hand. Round the next bend I found a narrow winze going off to the right. A feint gleam of light shone on the wet floor of it. The winze sloped down to a drift, which narrowed till it was no wider than my body. The roof came right down till I was bent low. Twice I cracked my head against the rock roof. I could have done with a helmet in these low runnels. It got wetter as we descended until the water splashed around my calves. The passage twisted and turned, following the haphazard line of some old seam that had been worked. Round a bend I suddenly came upon him, not twenty feet away from me. He was standing with his lamp in his hand, looking straight towards me. It was almost as though he were waiting for me. I froze, wondering whether he had seen me. But apparently not, for he shone his lamp towards the roof. It was quite high where he stood and a ledge of rock ran up to a hole that looked no bigger than a rabbit's burrow. A stream of dirty liquid gushed from it. He fixed his lamp to his helmet, climbed the ledge and disappeared head-first into the hole.
I waited a moment and then followed. The hole was about three feet high and two wide. The air in it was stale. It smelt dank and rotten. I crawled on hands and knees for perhaps twenty feet through filthy water. Then the roof rose and I could stand upright again. The old man's lamp bobbed ahead of me like a will-o'-the-wisp. We turned right at a fork, climbed along a narrow ledge that dropped away to nothing, and then turned right, into another gallery.
I was beginning to lose my sense of direction in this maze. The tunnel curved away to the left. The light of his lamp grew brighter. He had stopped. I, too, stood still. He could not be more than twenty feet ahead of me. Then the light grew fainter. I followed. My torch was switched off. I was going forward by the diffused light of the lamp ahead.
Suddenly my right foot met nothing. I flung the weight of my body back as I fell. It was the only thing that saved me. I fell back with my left leg twisted under me and my hands braced against the rock on either side. I felt about with my right foot as I sat there. The floor of the tunnel dropped away. There was no floor there.
Manack's light was fading. Shielding my torch, I switched it on. I was sitting on the lip of a hole about two foot six across. I thrust the naked beam of the torch into the hole. It was a narrow shaft. Its aged rock walls were covered with slime and glistened with the water that seeped out of every crevice. It went down and down. I could not see the bottom of it, but I heard the faint sound of the sea above the steady drip of the water. There was a corresponding hole in the roof. It was an old shaft. Perhaps two hundred years old. Probably it had been cut when the mine was first being developed.
I was in a cold sweat. But for the fact that I had instinctively fallen back on to my other leg, I should now have been lying at the bottom of that black funnel, broken and crushed with the sea sucking at my body.
I got to my feet and stepped across the yawning circle of the shaft. It needed an effort of will to go on. It had been a near thing and I was badly shaken. I'd never been in an old mine before. At the next bend I had to stop, for Manack was standing by the entrance to another narrow gallery, his head cocked on one side as though listening. I could see his eyes glittering in the light of his lamp which was reflected from the streaming walls. Again I had the feeling that he was waiting for me.
This feeling became an obsession. I started to wonder whether he had deliberately chosen a gallery that led across an old shaft. But it seemed ridiculous. Why should the man think any one was following him? With the sound of water all round he couldn't possibly have heard me falling.
He disappeared into the dark cleft. Again I was following his lamp as it led me like a will-o' — the-wisp along a twisting corridor in the rock. I went more carefully now, using my torch where possible, and where not, testing in front of me with my feet at each step.
The light ahead suddenly vanished completely as though it had been blown out. I waited a second in the darkness, listening. I could hear nothing but the sound of water and a distant whispering that might have been the sea or a gush of water. It was an eerie sensation, standing there in the complete darkness, listening for the sound of a footstep that I could not possibly hear.
At length I switched on my torch and went forward by the red gleam that shone between my fingers. A few steps farther on I caught quite definitely the sound of the sea. It was a whispering murmur, like the sound of wind in trees. The gallery opened and the floor of it vanished again, sloping in wet rock into an abyss of watery sound. A whole seam had been hewn out here, leaving a blank space between the rock walls. And high above me a little circle of moonlit sky showed. It was a long way away, like a pin-point of light. It was hard to believe that up there was a world of gorse and heather with the lights of farmsteads shining out. Maybe at this very moment the girl and boy I'd seen earlier in the day were leaning against the circular wall that marked the shaft, gazing out across the sea to the silver of the moon track. It didn't seem there could be any world, but this nightmare maze of tunnels creeping tortuously through dripping, slime-covered rock.
The floor of the gallery didn't vanish like it had done before. It continued across the sloping surface of the rock in a wooden platform. Most of the lagging had decayed and fallen away. But the bare stulls, driven into holes in the rock, remained. They were green and rotten with age. I tested the nearest with my boot, clinging to a hand-hold on the rock before trusting my full weight on it. The wood broke with a soft crunch and I could hear it bouncing down against the rock walls until the sound of it was drowned by the sound of the water.
It was no use trusting my weight to those wooden stumps. Yet Manack had gone ahead of me. I shone my torch across the gap. It was about twenty feet and on the other side there was the dark cleft of the gallery continuing. For a wild moment I thought I was what old Cornish miners would have called pisky-led. Suppose that light I had been following wasn't Manack's at all? The old stories of the Knockers and the Hand of Dorcas came to me. And then I bent down and shone my torch along the line of the stulls.