The Descending Line

For four days the last stroke on the rock stood unfinished. Each time I took up the chisel, I knew the shaft would answer. But on the fourth day, I tied the plumb line fast to the winding gear and bound its end about my waist. The decision to go down into the shaft I did not call a duty. I could no longer. Only that, at the bottom, what answered the chisel — the work broken off four days before, I had to finish.

Before going down, I looked a last time at the tally on the rock. Below the twentieth line I had cut, the line missing its last stroke — in the place that should have been blank — there was one more line. A twenty-first. It was not freshly cut. It was worn by wind and rain, its last figure past reading. Below the line I had cut this very day, there was a line that had been wearing since before I came.

The tally had grown ahead of the men. The next line was already worn before it was cut. I no longer did the thing of laying my own name over the worn place. There was no need — that place had already been decided.

That Latin engraved on the iron frame of the winding gear stood in my mind the whole way down on the line.

I went down on the line into the dark. The red threads passed my hand a fathom at a time. At forty-two fathoms the bottom the printed register promised should have been. But nothing touched my feet. At forty-eight fathoms the bottom the line had reached four days before should have been. Nothing touched my feet. As it never did when sounded, the bottom did not wait for me. As far as I went down, by that much further down it had gone.

The red threads ran out. It was the line's end. Below it nothing touched my feet, and above, the light of the pit-mouth was far, a point the size of a coin. The dull ringing that had answered the chisel now rang on every side, in time with the beat of my heart. The shaft had not waited for me. The shaft had waited for one worn line to be filled into its tally.

The sentence stops there. After it, only blank leaves remain in the notebook.