Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [286]
“Why,” he cried, “it’s like the cathedral, but underground.”
It was. The galleries disappeared into the distance like aisles. In places, the vaulted ceilings were as high as those in the great building. The quarry at Chilmark, with its soft echoing spaces, was truly like a great church.
“It’s the cathedral’s womb,” the young man at his side remarked. “And we’ve still enough stone down here to build a second church too.”
For two hours Osmund wandered, torch in hand, through the endless caves. It gave him a pleasure he could not explain to know that the great cathedral whose vaults would soar over him had been pulled by pick and human hand, out of the bowels of the earth.
He spent two weeks at the quarry that first time, and on his return, the carters going back to Salisbury let him ride with them. There were six carts of stone to be transported that day, but to his surprise he saw that a further six carts, full of rubble and debris from the mine shafts and workshop had been added to the little procession.
“What is that for?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” the carter told him. And sure enough, when they had travelled five miles the carters began, one after another, to shovel the contents of these carts on to the road. “We surface the road as we go,” his companion explained. “After all, not only stone comes out of a mine, and you’ve to put the rubbish somewhere.”
A month later, Osmund made a second, and more ambitious expedition for himself, this time down the river to the harbour. The little town by the coast now boasted both a tiny stone castle on a mound by the river, and a fine Norman priory church whose name, Christchurch, was generally applied to the town itself in preference to the old Saxon name of Twyneham. Here, looking across to the empty headland with its low protecting hill and its deserted earthwork walls, he saw the huge wooden barges enter the still harbour waters, bearing their precious load of marble from the western quarries along the coast, and begin to make their slow way up the river Avon to Sarum.
Always there was so much to learn. As the cathedral’s walls slowly rose, the labourers hauled up huge barrels of chalk, lime and flint which were poured into the gap between the inner and outer stone.
“It’s not only quicker than making the walls of solid stone,” Bartholomew explained, “but the lime rubble binds with the stone. It’s as solid as can be.”
And the mason marvelled as he realised that the rising cathedral was not only made of stone, but contained, locked within its walls, great cliffs of lime and chalk.
Another discovery he made one day, soon after his journey down the river, concerned the cathedral’s windows. Why he should have begun, during one of his daily inspections of the model, to count them he could not say, unless it was that there was no other feature of the model he did not know by heart. But count them he did; and so it was that, to his surprise, he discovered that there were three hundred and sixty-five.
“One for each day of the year!” he cried aloud with delight. And thinking he must have made a mistake, he counted again, keeping tally on a slate. It was exact: 365.
Was it by Elias’s design, or by accident? He did not dare to ask him. But one thing he was certain of: “It’s a sign from God,” he murmured, “that’s for sure.” And he crossed himself.
Osmund was a humble soul, and the more he learned, the more conscious he became of his own ignorance and of the greatness of those who had designed and organised the great cathedral. Often at the end of the day he would go to the little chapel and pray beside the model, whispering: “Blessed Mary, make me worthy to be a mason.”
And it was here, one evening a few months later that he had his second and last encounter with the great Elias. The canon had just walked over from the Leadenhall, the fine house with its leaded roof that he had built for himself beside the river; and he had entered the chapel quietly. But he stopped with surprise at the