"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 1 - The Burrowers Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

you). A heavy gas knocks a bird out in a wink, which lets you know it's time
to get out! I wore protective gear and high boots in case of water -Harden's
not all that far from the sea, and it's one of the deepest pits in the
country. Funny thing, but I expected water, yet as it happened I was quite
wrong; it was dry as a bone down there. I had a modern lamp on my helmet with
a good, powerful beam, and I carried a map of the galleries and seams -
standard procedure but hardly necessary in my case.
Well, anyway, I got down the shaft all right and gave the old handset at the
bottom a twirl to let the boys on top know that everything was well, and then
I set out along the horizontal connecting-shaft to the west-side galleries and
coal-seams. Now, you have to understand, Mr Crow, that the main passages are
often pretty big things. Some of them are almost as' large as any single
tube-tunnel in London. I mention this to show that I wasn't shut in, like, or
suffering from claustrophobia or anything like that, and it wasn't as if I
hadn't been down a pit before - but there was, well, something!
It's hard for me to explain on paper like this, but - oh, I don't know - I had
this feeling that - it was as if - well, did you ever play hide-and-seek as a
child and go into a room where someone was hiding? You can't see him, it's
dark, and he's quiet as a mouse, but you know he's in there all the same!
That's what it was like down there in that deserted mine. And yet it was truly
deserted - at that time anyway . . .
Well, I shook this feeling off and went on until I reached the west-side
network. This is almost two horizontal miles from the main shaft. Along the
way I had seen evidence of deterioration in the timbers, but not enough to
explain away the subsidences on the surface. So far as I could see, there had
been no actual cave-ins. The place did stink, though, like nothing I'd ever
smelled before, but it wasn't any sort of gas to affect the budgie or me. Just
a very unpleasant smell. Right at the end of the connecting-shaft, at a spot
almost directly under Blackhill, I came across the first of the new tunnels.
It entered into the shaft from the side away from the sea, and frankly it
stopped me dead! I mean, what would you have made of it?
It was a hole, horizontal and with hard, regular walls, but it was cut through
solid rock and not coal! Now, I like to keep slap-up-to-date on mining
methods, but I was pretty sure right from the start that this tunnel wasn't
dug using any system or machinery I knew of. And yet it seemed I must have
missed something somewhere. The thing wasn't shown on my map, though, so in
the end I told myself that some new machinery must have been tested down there
before they'd closed the mine. I was
damned annoyed, I'll tell you - nobody had told me to expect this!
The mouth of the tunnel was about eight feet in diameter, and although the
roof wasn't propped up or timbered in any way the bore looked safe-as-houses,
solid somehow. I decided to go on down it to see how far it went. It was all
of half a mile long, that shaft, Mr Crow; none of it timbered, straight as a
die, and the neatest bit of tunnelling work I've seen underground in
twenty-five years. Every two hundred yards or so similar tunnels would come in
from the sides at right angles, and at three of these junctions there had been
heavy falls of rock. This warned me to be careful. Obviously these holes
weren't as solid as they looked!
I don't know where the thought came from, but suddenly I found myself thinking
of giant moles! I once saw one of these sensational film things about just