HOW OLD TOM FOUND THE SILVER HEART
One of the first things Stephen Gard had seen to, when he got matters
into his own hands, was the safeguarding of the mines from ever-possible
irruption of the sea. The great steam pumps kept the workings reasonably
clear of drainage water, but no earthly power could drain the sea if it
once got in.
The central shafts had sunk far below sea-level. The lateral galleries
had, in some cases, run out seawards and were now extending far under
the sea itself.
From the whirling coils of the tides and races round the coast, he
judged that the sea-bed was as seamed and broken and full of faults as
the visible cliffs ashore.
In bad weather, the men in those submarine galleries and the
outbranching tunnels could hear the crash of the waves above their
heads, and the rolling and grinding of the mighty boulders with which
they disported.
If, by chance, the sea should break through, the peril to life and
property would be great.
He therefore caused to be constructed and fitted inside each tunnel, at
the point where it branched from its main gallery, a stout iron door,
roughly hinged at the top and falling, in case of need, into the flange
of a thick wooden frame. The framework was fitted to the opening on the
seaward side, in a groove cut deep into the rock round each side and
top and bottom. The heavy iron door, when open, lay up against the roof
of the tunnel and was supported by two wooden legs. If the sea should
break through, the first rush of the water would sweep away the
supporting legs, the iron door would fall with a crash into the flange
of the wooden frame, and the greater the pressure the tighter it would
fit.
So the weight of the sea would seal the iron door against the wooden
casement, which would swell and press always tighter against the rock,
and that boring would be closed for ever. And if any man should be
inside the tunnel when the sea broke through, there he must stop,
drowned like a rat in its hole, unless by a miracle he could make his
way along the tunnel before the trap-door fell.
Gard never ceased to enjoin the utmost caution on the men who undertook
these outermost experimental borings.
His strict injunctions were to cease work at the first sign of water in
these undersea tunnels, make for the gallery, close the trap, and await
events.
Believing absolutely in the existence of one or more great central
deposits whence all these thin veins of silver had come, and hoping to
strike them at every blow of his pick, old Tom Hamon was the keenest
explorer and opener of new leads in the mine.
“The silver’s there all right,” he said, time and again, “it only wants
finding,” and he pushed ahead, here and there, wherever he thought the
chances most favourable.
He took his rightful pay along with the rest for the work he did, but it
was not for wages he wrought. Ever just beyond the point of his
energetic pick lay fortune, and he was after it with all his heart and
soul and bodily powers.
For months he had been following up a vein which ran out under the sea,
and grew richer and richer as he laid it bare. He believed it would lead
him to the mother vein, and that to the heart of all the Sark silver.
And so he toiled, early and late, and knew no weariness.
His tunnel, in places not more than three and four feet high and between
two and three feet wide, extended now several hundred feet under the
sea, and was fitted at the gallery end with the usual raised iron door.
It was hot work in there, in the dim-lighted darkness, in spite of the
fact that the sea was close above his head. Fortunately, here and there,
he had come upon curious little chambers like empty bubbles in one-time
molten rock, ten feet across and as much in height, some of them, and
curiously whorled and wrought, and these allowed him breathing spaces
and welcome relief from the crampings of the passage.
When he had broken into such a chamber it needed, at times, no little
labour to rediscover his vein on the opposite side. But he always found
it in time, and broke through the farther wall with unusual difficulty,
and went on.
The men generally worked in pairs, but old Tom would have no one with
him. He did all the work, picking and hauling the refuse single-handed.
The work should be his alone, his alone the glory of the great and
ultimate discovery.
The rocks above him sweated and dripped at times, but that was only to
be expected and gave him no anxiety. Alone with his eager hopes he
chipped and picked, and felt no loneliness because of the flame of hope
that burned within him. Above him he could hear the long roll and growl
of the wave-tormented boulders--now a dull, heavy fall like the blow of
a gigantic mallet, and again a long-drawn crash like shingle grinding
down a hillside. But these things he had heard before and had grown
accustomed to.
And so it was fated that, one day, after patiently picking round a great
piece of rock till it was loosened from its ages-old bed, he felt it
tremble under his hand, and leaning his weight against it, it
disappeared into space beyond.
That had happened before when he struck one of the chambers, and he felt
no uneasiness. If there had been water beyond, it would have given him
notice by oozing round the rock as he loosened it. The brief rush of
foul gas, which always followed the opening of one of these hollows, he
avoided by lying flat on the ground until he felt the air about him
sweeter again.
Then, enlarging the aperture with his pick, he scrambled through into
this chamber now first opened since time began.
It was like many he had seen before, but considerably larger. Holding
his light at arm’s length, above his head, a million little eyes
twinkled back at him as the rays shot to and fro on the pointed facets
of the rock crystals which hung from the roof and started out of the
walls and ground.
The gleaming fingers seemed all pointed straight at him. Was it in
mockery or in acknowledgment of his prowess?
For, in among the pointing fingers, it seemed to him that the
silver-bearing veins ran thick as the setting of an ancient jewel,
twisted and curling and winding in and out so that his eyes were dazzled
with the wonder of it all.
“A man! A man at last! Since time began we have awaited him, and this
is he at last!” so those myriad eyes and pointing fingers seemed to cry
to him.
And up above, the roar and growl of the sea sounded closer than ever
before.
But he had found his treasure and he heeded nought beside. Here, of a
surety, he said to himself, was the silver heart from which the
scattered veins had been projected. He had found what he had sought with
such labours and persistency. What else mattered?
And then, without a moment’s warning--the end.
No signal crackings, no thin jets or streams from the green immensity
beyond.
Just one universal collapse, one chaotic climacteric, begun and ended in
the same instant, as the crust of the chamber, no longer supported by
the in-pent air, dissolved under the irresistible pressure of the sea.
Where the sparkling chamber had been was a whirling vortex of bubbling
green water, in which tumbled grotesquely the body of a man.
The water boiled furiously along the tunnel and foamed into the gallery.
The wooden supports of the iron door gave way; the door sank slowly into
its appointed place.
Old Tom Hamon was dead and buried.