Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [74]
The square of light was dim and small now, the air was warm and damp and smelled of creosote. She found herself breathing through her mouth. The candle on the manager’s hat flickered along a sluggish upward flow of yellowish rock. As they sank, the shaft appeared to narrow, the walls pinched and squeezed together. If anything should slump or cave they would all be pressed into the rock like fossils.
“All right?” Oliver said. A solid shadow, he might have been looking down at her; somehow she felt he was smiling. His arm squeezed her hand against his side.
“Of course she’s all right,” said Prager. “This is a thoroughbred. Not one lady-like scream.”
“I wouldn’t dare scream,” Susan said shakily. “If I started I couldn’t stop.”
Their laughter reassured her. They took this descent into Hades as casually as she would go down a flight of stairs.
The single candle wavered, their shadows slid on the upward-flowing rock. Then the rock became plank, the skip snagged for an instant that stopped her heart, shook free, rattled past some obstruction. A hole gaped, hollowed by dim light out of utter blackness, and in the hollow she saw a loaded ore car, a man beside it, both of them already sliding up out of sight before they had been more than half seen. “Hello, Tommy,” Oliver said to the vanishing apparition. “Going down to the four hundred. You’ll have a little wait.”
The hole had already squeezed shut, wiping him out from the head downward. Smudged face, white eyes, yellow pocket of light, obscure body and legs and ore car, were gone. Plank was wet rock again. “There was a picture for you,” said Conrad Prager.
“For Rembrandt, you mean.”
Her heart was thudding from the momentary alarm of the snag ging skip; she quivered from the unexpectedness of that encounter. It was as if a shutter had opened and a wild face looked in for an awful moment and then been shut back into its blackness. It terrified her to think that the whole riddled mountain crawled with men like that one. Under her feet as she walked in sunshine, under her stool and umbrella as she sat sketching, under the piazza as she rocked the baby in his cradle, creatures like that one were swinging picks, drilling holes, shoveling, pushing ore cars, sinking in cages to ever deeper levels, groping along black tunnels with the energy of ants. It raised the gooseflesh on her arms; it was as if she had suddenly discovered that the conduits of her blood teemed with tiny, busy, visible vermin.
Another plank wall, another tunnel, empty this time, with only a pair of rails leading into it, incomplete radii cut off in darkness, disappearing long before whatever center it was they were drawn toward. The opening closed, they sank deeper, groaning. The rock that had once been yellowish now threw gleams of greenish black from its wet surfaces. “We’re into the serpentine here,” Oliver said to Prager.
Down, down. The air was more oppressive. With its lingering taint of creosote it reminded her of breathing tincture of benzoin from a croup kettle.
“Next level,” Oliver said. “Anything wrong?”
“No. Oh no.” But she was glad when the constricted shaft opened out into another tunnel. Mr. Kendall, watching the floor come up, yanked on the bell wire and the skip shuddered and rattled to a halt. The groaning died; there was a lonely sound of dripping water. When they had helped her out onto the uneven floor, Oliver scratched a lucifer match on his seat and lit her candle, Mr. Prager’s, his own. In the enlarged bloom of light she could see for some distance down the timbered drift with its toy rails converging toward a vanishing point that was simultaneous with total blackness. Down this drift, with Kendall walking ahead and the others steering her by the elbows, they made their way. Inevitably she thought of Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice, and up on top Tregoning, Charon of this vertical Styx; but the thought of how silly it would sound to speak that thought made her blot it out. About used up, I should