“Well, what do you think of this, Mr. Bentall?”
“It looks like the catacombs in Rome,” I said. “But not so cheery.”
“It’s a remarkable mining feat,” the professor said severely. He didn’t care for any flippancy about his nearest and dearest, and his nearest and dearest would always be those dank and gloomy holes in the ground. “Very difficult stuff to work with, this limestone, and when you have to support a thick layer of basaltic lava and half the weight of a volcano above it it becomes very tricky indeed. This mountainside is honeycombed with similar caverns, all joined by tunnels. Hexagonal system. Those domed roofs give the greatest structural strength, but there’s a limit to their size. The mining company only managed to get out about a third of the available limestone before the cost of supporting pillars to hold the roof in place became prohibitive.”
“Doesn’t that make this blasting rather dangerous, then?” I thought an interested question might put me back in his good books.
“Well, yes, it is, rather,” he said thoughtfully. “Chance we have to take. Chance we must take. Interests of. science. Come and see where our first discoveries were made.”
He led the way straight across the cavern to the tunnel opposite to the one by which we’d entered and went down this, hopping briskly along the sleepers of the railway tracks. After about twenty yards we entered another cavern, in height, width and number of exit tunnels the duplicate of the one we had just left. There was no illumination here other than one single lamp suspended from the electric light cable that traversed the width of the cavern and vanished down the faraway tunnel, but it was enough to let me see that the two tunnels to the left had been blocked off by heavy vertical baulks of timber.
“What happened there, professor? Cave-in?”
“Afraid so.” He shook his head. “Two tunnels and parts of the caverns to which they led collapsed at the same time. Had to shore up the tunnel entrances in case the collapse spread to this chamber. Before my time, of course. I believe three men perished in the right-hand cavern in there-they’d just started to excavate it. A bad business, a bad business.” He paused for a few moments to let me see how bad he thought it had been, then said brightly: “Well, this is the historic spot.”
It was a five-foot niche in the wall just to the right of the tunnel by which we’d entered the cavern. To me it was just a five-foot niche. But to Witherspoon it was a temple and he himself the officiating priest.
“This,” he said reverently, “is where the mystery of Polynesia and the Polynesians was solved. It was here that were found the first adze-heads, stone mortars and pestles. It was this that triggered off the biggest archaeological discovery of our generation. Doesn’t it make you think, Mr. Bentall?”
“It certainly does.” I refrained from specifying the nature of my thoughts. Instead I reached out for a spur of rock, damp and slimy to the touch, and pulled it off with little effort. I said in surprise: “Pretty soft stuff, this. You’d think picks or pneumatic drills would be almost as effective as blasting for removing this stuff.”
“And so they are, my boy, and so they are. But how would you like to tackle basalt with a pick and shovel?” he asked jovially. “A different proposition altogether.”
“I’d forgotten about that,” I confessed. “Of course, when the lava poured down it covered everything. What kind of stuff do you find in the basalt-pottery, stone utensils, axe handles, things like that?”
“To name only a very few,” he nodded. He hesitated, then said: ‘To speak frankly, unlike the average merchant, I put only my worst goods in the shop window. The things you saw in my room I regard only as trinkets, as the merest trifles. I have one or two hidden caches in here-I wouldn’t dream of even hinting to you where they are-that contain a fantastic collection of Neolithic Polynesian relics that will astound the scientific world. Astound them.”
He moved off again, but instead of crossing the chamber and following the electric cable and far-spaced lights down the opposite tunnel, he switched on a torch and turned into the first tunnel on his right, pointing out the various places from which those Polynesian relics had been recovered. He stopped in front of a particularly large excavation in the limestone and said: “And here we excavated the joists and timbers of what must be the oldest wooden house in the world. In an almost perfect state of preservation.”
“And how old was that?”
“Seven thousand years, near enough,” he said promptly. “Van Duprez, of Amsterdam, who was out here with all the newspaper people, says it’s only four thousand. But the man’s a fool, of course.”
“What basis do you use for assessing the age of those things?” I asked curiously.
“Experience and knowledge,” he said flatly. “Van Duprez, despite his inflated reputation, hasn’t got a great deal of either. Man’s a fool.” \
“Um,” I said noncommittally. I looked apprehensively at the third chamber now opening out before us. “How deep are we here?”
“About a hundred feet, I should say. Perhaps a hundred and twenty. Moving into the side of the mountain, you know. Nervous, Mr. Bentall?”
“Sure, I’m nervous. I never realized you archaeologists went so deep or that you could find any trace of early life so deep. This must be about a record, eh?”
“Close to it, close to it,” he said complacently. “Thought they went pretty deep in the Nile valley and Troy, you know.” He led the way across the third chamber into a tunnel sparsely illuminated with battery lamps. “We should find Hewell and his crew down here.” He glanced at his watch. “They must be about due to pack up shortly. Been at it here all day.”
They were still working when we arrived at the spot where the tunnel began to open out into a rudimentary fourth chamber. There were nine men there altogether, some prising out lumps of limestone with pickaxes and crowbars to add to the heap of rubble at their feet, others loading the rubble on to rubber-tyred wheel-barrows while a gigantic man clad only in denim trousers and singlet closely examined each lump with a powerful torch.
Both the workers and the man with the torch were worth looking at. The workers were all Chinese, unusually tall and heavily-built for members of their race, and looked about the toughest and hardest-bitten characters I’d ever seen. But it could have been pure illusion: that feeble light shining on sweat- and dust-coated faces would have made anyone seem unnatural.
But there was no illusion about the foreman who straightened from his examination of the rock and came to meet us. He was the toughest and hardest-bitten character I’d ever seen. He was about six feet three niches tall, but stunted for his breadth, with a couple of massive arms ending in five-fingered shovels that almost brushed his knees. His face looked as if it had been carved from solid rock by a sculptor whose only ambition was to get the job done in a hurry: there wasn’t a curve worth calling a curve in his entire face, just a granitic mass of crudely intersecting planes that would have had the old cubist boys jumping for joy. He had a chin like a power-shovel, a gash for a mouth, a huge beak of a nose and black cold eyes set so far back under the beetling overhang of tufted brows that you had the illusion of some wild animal peering out from the dark depths of a cave. The sides of his face-you couldn’t have called them cheeks-and forehead were deeply trenched by a criss-cross of sun-weathered lines, like some ancient parchment. He would have had a terrible time making the romantic lead in a musical comedy.
Professor Witherspoon introduced us and Hewell stretched out his hand and said: “Glad to meet you, Bentall.” His voice, deep and cavernous, matched both his vast frame and his occupation, and he was glad to see me with the same sort of gladness that you would have found in those same islands a hundred years previously when the cannibal chief hailed the arrival of the latest of a long line of toothsome missionaries. I braced myself as the giant hand closed over mine, but he was surprisingly gentle: it felt as if I was being pulled through a power wringer, but when he gave me back my hand all the fingers were still there, bent and mangled a bit, but still there.
“Heard about you this morning,” he boomed. Canada or the American north-west, I couldn’t be sure. “Heard your wife wasn’t so well, neither. The islands: anything can happen in the islands. Must have had a terrible time.”