The Next Line on the Rock

For four days, each time I passed the pit-mouth I remembered the moment the line in my hand had drawn taut. To forget it I chose the counting. I let the plumb line down, I counted the red threads, I set down the depth. But the Mining Bureau register lay beside me holding its printed figure of forty-two fathoms, and each day I had to watch that figure and my own sounding diverge. On the fourth day the weight did not touch bottom until forty-eight fathoms.

That day, I closed the register. With the dry hemp line, with the new cotton thread alike, the depth grew each day. It was not the line that had stretched. What had grown was the shaft. I would make a cleaner table, I told myself — one with not the register's false figure but the true depth I had sounded. A scholar's task, I thought. The task of one faithful to his duty.

On a blank sheet I copied date and depth. April 11th, forty-three fathoms. The 12th, forty-five. The 13th, forty-six. The 14th, forty-eight. The numbers did not lie. They only grew. I hung the table beside the iron frame of the winding gear — beside the Latin of the German maker's plate.

What that unlying number grew toward, four days before I had asked and not answered. That day I came to another question. If the shaft deepens though no one digs, then the setting-down of that depth is not surveying — but the watching of what grows.

I went to the rock beside the pit-mouth. It was the old tally where each surveyor, on his posting, had cut the depth he sounded with a chisel. The top was sharp, and the lower one went the more wind and rain had worn it. I brought the lamp close and, for the first time, counted the lines to their end.

Beginning at twenty-something fathoms, climbing past forty to my own turn, nineteen lines were cut into the rock. I counted them, and counted again. The surveyors ever posted to this shaft on the Bureau register — so far as I could recall the handover papers — were nine men. Nine men had been posted, and on the rock there were nineteen lines.

The instant my fingertip traced those worn lines, a cold like the chill of the shaft ran down my spine. I tried to give a reasonable account of it — might not one surveyor have cut several lines over several years, not at each posting but at each sounding? But then the lines should have been more. The surveying was daily. The number nineteen — more than nine, fewer than daily — fit some other reckoning. Not the count of men posted, but that count plus the men who did not come back up.

Yet I took up the chisel. Out of fidelity to my duty, I told myself. As those before me had, to leave the true depth I had sounded in the rock, so the next surveyor would not be deceived by the register's false figure. Forty-eight fathoms. Below the nineteen worn lines, at the twentieth place, I set the chisel.

The instant the chisel cut the first stroke, somewhere below in the shaft, in time exactly with the striking of the chisel, something rang once — dully. When I cut, it rang; when I stopped, it ceased. I stopped my hand. The ringing ceased. I cut again. It rang again. The shaft was answering my chisel — as though it had long waited for one more line to be added to its tally.

The sentence breaks off there. As it had four days before. I did not finish the last stroke. The hand that held the chisel stopped, and the shaft knew the stopping.

As I write this, the Bureau register is closed, and the new table I drew hangs beside the iron frame. On the rock the twentieth line is cut. Only its last stroke is not yet finished.