One Fathom Deeper

That day's work, too, ended with the measuring of the shaft's depth. I hung the plumb line over the wooden pulley of the winding gear and lowered the sounding weight tied to its end slowly down past the pit-mouth. Every fathom along the line I had knotted a red thread for a graduation. I judged with my fingertip the moment the weight touched bottom and the line went slack, and counted the red threads that had paid out to that point — that was the depth of the shaft. There was a kind of solace in the counting. A month since I had come up into the mountains; I no longer remembered when I had last shaped a human word with my mouth.

To a mine surveyor a shaft must always be the same depth. A shaft that was forty-two fathoms yesterday is forty-two fathoms today and will be forty-two fathoms ten years on. The rock did not break its promise — the surveying I had been taught, at least, held it so. A shaft is deep only by as much as men have dug down into it, and stops exactly where the digging stopped. Trusting in that stillness, I came to admit that this single vertical thread of darkness was the one companion the mountains offered.

Among a surveyor's duties is the measuring of the shaft's depth once each day and the setting of it down in the field notebook. There was a printed gallery register sent down by the Bureau, and beside it I set down the depth I had sounded to compare. Stamped into the register were my predecessor's figures, surveyed before my posting. Who he was I do not know. The handover had been finished at headquarters with a single sheet of paper, and all he left behind was that register and one sounding weight too heavy to sit easy in the hand.

That evening, when I had hauled in the line and counted the red threads, I saw that the register's figure and my own sounding were a fathom apart.

The register read forty-two fathoms. But that day the weight had touched bottom at forty-three. In surveying a fathom's error is a large one. I hauled the line in again and counted the red threads from the start, carefully. Forty-three. I let the line down and measured once more. This time the weight stopped at forty-four. The same shaft, by the same line, sounded twice within the space of a single meal.

The instant my fingertip traced that one fathom of paid-out line, a cold like the chill of the shaft ran down my spine. "The mountains in April are cold like this as a matter of course," I muttered to myself, trying to give a reasonable account of the chill that seemed to rise from the pit-mouth. The line had stretched, surely — cotton thread stretches when it takes on damp, and is the inside of a shaft not always wet, I added.

Stamped into the iron frame of the winding gear was the maker's plate. It was a German thing brought in by way of Japan, and in a month I had only polished it, never read it. That day, when I brought the lamp close, a single line of Latin engraved on the frame rose to my eye.

"Number does not lie" — as the motto of a surveying machine it was a fitting sentence. But what that unlying number grew toward, or what grew up toward the number, the Latin did not say.

On the rock beside the pit-mouth there was a tally of depths cut by the surveyors before me. It was an old custom that each surveyor, on his posting, chiselled in the depth he had sounded. The figure at the top was sharp of letter, and the lower one read the more it had been worn away by wind and rain. The oldest, the lowest line of all, had lost its last digit to wear.

Twenty-something fathoms. The oldest of all, the depth from when this shaft was first cut. I traced the worn place with my fingertip. The shaft had deepened from twenty fathoms to forty over the course of forty years — because men had dug it so. But men dug no longer. The coal had run out long ago, they said. There was no one digging, and yet the figure of the one who set the depth down had grown, year upon year.

I resolved to let the line down once more. Out of fidelity to my duty, I told myself. To swap the stretched line for a dry one, to confirm that the shaft was the same forty-two fathoms as yesterday, and so to correct the register's figure.

I changed to a dry hemp line and lowered the weight. The red threads should have stopped at the forty-second. But the weight sank on past the forty-second thread. Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five. The weight had not touched bottom by the time it reached the line's end. And in that instant, when the line was all paid out, somewhere below in the shaft, in time with the swinging of the weight, something rang once — dully.

The sentence breaks off there. I took up the brush to write the next letter, but at my fingertip something refused the brush. It was the same kind of cold as when I had touched the rock at the pit-mouth. Yet the ink went on. Without my being aware of it, a single line of figures was set down — slowly, for those who come after.

In that instant the plumb line in my hand drew taut once — for a very brief moment — and went slack. There was no wind. The pulley of the winding gear did not turn. What had drawn the line down and let it go, the darkness below the pit-mouth did not answer. That was all, and presently the line hung slack again under its own weight.

I set the depth down precisely in the margin of the notebook. Surely the dry line, too, had taken on the damp of the shaft — is the space of a single meal not time enough for cotton or hemp to drink in water?

Even now, as I write this, the plumb line hangs on the nail beside me. Beside the Latin of the iron frame, the weight hangs straight under its own weight and points at the darkness of the pit-mouth.

I look at the familiar length of the line on its nail. Will it not draw taut once more — but the line does not move.