"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.1.-.Burrowers.Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)
Shudde-M'ell ican-icanicas fl'hur orr'e G'harne.
Restricted as I am at this time regarding further illuminating my interest in the case, or even explaining the origin of my knowledge of it, but still in the hope of an early answer and perhaps a more detailed account of what you encountered underground, I am, Sir,
Yrs sincerely, Titus Crow
Coalville Recorder Coalville, Leics. 28th May
Blowne House
Dear Mr Crow,
In answer to your 58/1%-, of the 25th:
The tremors that shook Coalville, Leics., on the afternoon of the 17th, were, as you correctly deduced, of a linear nature. (And yes, they did occur south heading north; have in fact continued, or so I believe, farther up-country.) As you are no doubt aware, Coalville is central in an area of expanding mining operations, and doubtless the collapse of old diggings was responsible, in this area
at least, for the peculiar shocks. They lasted from 4:30 until 8:00 p.m., but were not particularly severe - though, I am told, they had a very bad effect on certain inmates of the local Thornelee Sanatorium.
There were, too, other slight surface subsidences, not nearly so bad, almost a year ago. At about that time also, five miners were lost in the collapse of a very narrow and unproductive seam which they were working. The twin brother of one of these men was in a different part of the mine at the time, and much sensational publicity was given his subsequent condition. I did not cover his case, though it was done up pretty distastefully in a hack contemporary of the Recorder under the heading: 'Siamese Mining Horror!' Apparently the living twin went stark staring mad at the very instant his brother and the other four men were killed!
You should be interested in a series of articles which I am at present planning for the Recorder, 'A History of the Midlands Pits', to be published later this year, and I would be pleased to send you the various chapters as they appear if you so desire.
Yours faithfully, William Plant
Alston, Cumberland 28th May
Blowne House Dear Mr Crow,
I got your letter yesterday afternoon, and not being much of a writing man, I'm not sure how to answer it, or even if I can find the right words.
First off, let me say you are quite right about the pictures on the tunnel walls - and also about the chanting. How you could know about these things I can't possibly
imagine! So far as I know, I'm the only one to have been down that shaft since they closed the pit, and I'm damned if I can think of any other spot on or under the earth where you might have heard sounds like those I heard, or seen drawings the like of them on the tunnel walls. But you obviously have! Those crazy words you wrote down were just like what I heard . . .
Of course, I should have gone down there with a mate, but my No. 2 was off sick at the time and I thought it was going to be just another routine job. Well, as you know, it wasn't!
The reason they asked me to go down and check the old pit out was twofold - I'd worked the seams, all of them, as a youngster and knew my way about, and of course (to hell with what Betteridge says) I am an Experienced inspector - but mainly someone had to do the job to see if the empty seams could be propped up or filled in. I imagine that the many subsidences and cave-ins round Ilden and Blackhill have been giving the Coal-Board a bit of a headache of late.
Anyhow, you asked for a more detailed account of what I came up against underground, and I'll try to tell it as it happened. But can I take it that everything I say will be in confidence? See, I have a good pension coming from the Coal-Board in a few years' time, and naturally they don't much care for adverse stuff in the press, particularly stuff to worry local landowners and builders. People don't buy property that's not safe, or ground that's liable to subsidence! And since I've already had one ticking off as it is, well, I don't want to jeopardize my pension, that's all...
I think what really annoyed the bosses was when I went on about those tunnels I found down there - not old, timbered seams, mind you, but tunnels - round and pretty smoothly finished and certainly artificial. And not just
one, as they said in the Mail, but half a dozen! A proper maze, it was. Yes, I said those tunnel walls were burned rather than cut, and so they were. At least, that's how they looked, as though they'd somehow been coated on the inside with lava and then allowed to cool!
But there I go running ahead of myself. Better start at the beginning . . .
I went down the main shaft at Harden, using the old emergency lift-cage which they hadn't yet dismantled. There was a gang of lads at the top just in case the old machinery should go on the blink. I wasn't a bit worried, you understand; it's been my job for a long time now and I know all the dangers and what to look for.
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 such animals. Possibly that's where the idea sprang from in my mind. Anyway, I'd no sooner had this thought than I came to a spot where yet another tunnel joined the main one - but this one came down at an angle from above!
There was a hole opening into the ceiling, with the edges rounded off and smoothed in some way I don't understand, as if by heat like I said before. Well, I went dead slow from then on, but soon I came out of the tunnel into a big cave. At least, I took it to be a cave, but when I looked closer at the walls I saw that it wasn't! It was simply a junction of a dozen or so of the tunnels. Pillars like stalagmites held up the ceiling. This was where I saw the carvings, those pictures of octopus-things etched in the walls, and I don't think I need add how much that put the wind up me!
I didn't hang about there much longer (apart from anything else the stench was terrible), but long enough to check that the place was all of fifty feet across and that
the walls were coated or smoothed over with that same sort of lava-stuff. The floor was flat enough but crumbly, almost earthy, and right in the middle of the place I found four great cave-pearls. At least, I think they're cave-pearls. They're about four inches across, these things, very hard, heavy, and glossy. Don't ask me how they got down there, I don't know, and I can't see how they might have been formed naturally, like other cave-pearls I remember seeing when I was a kid. Anyway, I put them into a bag I carried and then went back the way I'd come to the terminal of the west-side workings. By then I'd been down there about an hour and a half.
I didn't get far into the actual coal-seams. The first half dozen were down. They had collapsed. But I soon enough found out what had brought them down! In and out of the old workings, lacing them like holes in Gorgonzola, those damned smooth-lined tunnels came and went, literally honeycombing the coal and rock alike! Then, in one of the few remaining old seams that still stood and where some poor-grade coal still remained, I came across yet another funny thing. A tunnel, one of the new ones, had been cut right along the original seam, and I noticed that here the walls weren't of that lava substance but a pitchy, hard tar, exactly the kind of deposit you find bubbling out of hot coal in the coke-ovens, only set as hard as rock . . . !
That was it. I'd had enough, and I set off back towards the main shaft and the lift-cage. It was then I thought I heard the chanting. Thought? - like hell I thought - I did hear it; and it was just as you wrote it down! It was distant, seeming to come from a very long way away, like listening to the sea in a shell or hearing a tune you remember in your head . . . But I knew I should never have been hearing things like that down there at all, and I took off for the lift-cage as fast as I could go.
Well, I'll keep the rest of it short, Mr Crow. I've probably said too much already as it is, and I just hope to God that you're not one of those reporter fellows. Still, I wanted to get it off my chest, so what the hell care I?
I finally arrived at the shaft bottom, by which time the chanting had died away, and I gave the lads on top a tinkle on the old handset to haul me up. At the top I made out my report, but not as fully as I've done here, and then I went home ... I kept the cave-pearls, as mementos if you like, and said nothing about them in my report. I don't see what good they'd be to anyone, anyway. Still, it does seem a bit like stealing. I mean, whatever the things really are - well, they're not mine, are they? I might just send them off anonymously to the museum at Sunderland or Radcar. I suppose the museum people will know what they are ...
The next morning the reporters came around from the Daily Mail. They'd heard I had a bit of a story to tell and pumped me for all I was worth. I had the idea they were laughing at me, though, so I didn't tell them a deal. They must have gone to see old Betteridge when finally they left me - and, well, you know the rest.
And that's it, Mr Crow. If there's something else you'd like to know just drop me another line. Myself, I'd be interested to learn how you come to know so much about it all, and why you want to know more . . .
Yrs sincerely, R. Bentham
PS
Maybe you heard how they were planning to send two more inspectors down to do the job I'd 'messed up'? Well, they couldn't. Just a few days ago the whole lot fell in! The road between Harden and Blackhill sank ten feet in places, and a couple of brick barns were brought down
at Castle-Ilden. There's had to be work done on the walls of the Red Cow Inn in Harden, too, and there have been slight tremors all over the area ever since. Like I said, the mine was rotten with those tunnels down there. I'm only surprised (and thankful!) it held up so long. Oh, and one other thing. I think that the smell I mentioned must, after all, have been produced by a gas of some sort. Certainly my head's been fuzzy ever since. Weak as a kitten, I've been, and damned if I don't keep hearing that awful, droning, chanting sound! All my imagination, of course, for you can take it from me that old Betteridge wasn't even partly right in what he said about me ...
R.B.
Blowne House 30th May
To: Raymond Bentham, Esq.
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