[Illustration: OLD DELABOLE.]
Where low and treeless hills roll out to the cliffs, and the gulls cry
their sea message over farms and fields, a mighty mouth opens upon the
midst of the land and gapes five hundred feet into the earth. In shape
of a crater it yawns, and its many-coloured cliffs slope from the
surface inwards. The great cup is chased and jewelled. Round it run many
galleries, some deserted, some alive with workers. Like threads of light
they circle it, now opening upon the sides of the rounded cliffs, now
suspended in air under perpendicular precipices. In the midst is the
quarter-mile incline that descends to the heart of the cup and connects
the works above with the works below; and elsewhere are other gentle
acclivities, where moraines of fallen stone ooze out in great cones
beneath the cliffs. Under them stand square black objects, dwarfed to
the size of match-boxes, which wrestle with this huge accumulation of
over-burden. Steam puffs from the machines; they thrust their scoops
into the fallen mass; at each dig they pick up a ton and a half of
rubbish and then deposit it in a trolley that waits for the load hard
by. A network of tram-lines branches every way in the bottom of the cup,
and extends its fingers to the points of attack; and where they end--at
smudges of silver-grey scattered about the bottom of the quarry--there
creep little atoms, like mites on a cheese.
Centuries have bedecked and adorned the sides of this stupendous pit;
and while naked sheets and planes of colour, the work of recent years,
still gleam starkly, all innocent of blade and leaf, elsewhere in
deserted galleries and among cliff-faces torn bare by vanished
generations of men, green things have made their home and flourished
with luxuriance, to the eternal drip of surface water. Ferns and
foxgloves and a thousand lesser plants thrive in niches and crevices of
the stone; and there is a splendid passage of flame, where the mimulus
has found its way by some rivulet into the quarry, and sheets a
precipice with gold.
By steps and scarps the sides fall, narrowing always to the bottom; but
the cliff planes are huge enough for sunshine and shadow to paint
wonderful pictures upon them and find the colours--the olive and blue
and mossy green, or the great splashes and patches of rose and russet
that make harmony there. They melt together brokenly; and sometimes they
are fretted with darkness and spotted with caverns, or mottled and
zigzagged by rusty percolations of iron.
One noble cliff falls sheer five hundred feet to a wilderness of rock,
and across its huge front there hang aerial threads, like gossamers,
while at its crown black wheels and chimneys tower into the sky. Below,
upon the bluff of a crag, there turns a wheel, and a great pump, with
intermittent jolt and grunt, sucks the water from the bottom of the
quarry and sends it to tanks up aloft. This machine, with its network of
arms and wheels, hangs very black on the cliff-side, and a note of black
is also carried into the midst of the grey and rosy cliff-faces by
little wheels that hang from the gossamers and tiny threads depending
from them. They drop to the mites in the silver-grey cheese beneath, and
from time to time masses and wedges of nearly two tons weight are
hoisted upward and float through the air to the surface, like
thistle-down.
The quarry is full of noises--the clank of the pumps, the rattle of the
trucks, the hiss of pneumatic and steam drills, the clink of tampers and
the rumble and rattle of the great rocks dislodged by crowbars from the
cliffs. Men shout, too, and their voices are as the drone of little
gnats; but sometimes, at the hour of blasting, an immense volume of
sound is liberated, and the thunder of the explosion crashes round and
round the cup and wakes a war of echoes thrown from cliff to cliff.
Once there were dwellings within the cup; but the needs of the quarry
caused their destruction, and now but two cottages remain. The ragged
cliff-edges creep towards them, and they will soon vanish, after
standing for a hundred years.
Everywhere the precious stone, now silver-green, now silver-grey, is
being dragged up the great incline, or wafted through air to the workers
above; and once aloft, another army of men and boys set to work upon it
and split and hack and chop and square it into usefulness. On all sides
the midgets are burrowing below and wrestling with the stone above;
thousands of tons leave the works weekly, and yet such is the immensity
of the mass, that the sides of the quarry seem hardly changed from year
to year. For more than three hundred and fifty years has man delved at
Old Delabole. Elizabethans worked its rare slate; and since their time,
labouring ceaselessly, we have scratched out this stupendous hole and
covered our habitations therefrom, through the length and breadth of
the United Kingdom. Cathedrals and cottages alike send to Delabole for
their slates; there are extant buildings with roofs two hundred years
old, that show no crack or flaw; while more ancient than the stones that
cover man's home must be those that mark his grave, and Delabole slates
in churchyards, or on church walls, might doubtless be found dating from
Tudor times.
Five hundred men and boys are employed at Old Delabole, and their homes
cluster in the little village without the works. Their type is Celtic,
but many very blonde, high-coloured men labour here. All are polite,
easy, and kindly; all appear to find their work interesting and take
pleasure in explaining its nature to those who may be interested. The
slate fills countless uses besides that of roofing, and the methods of
cleaving and cutting it cannot easily be described. Steam plays its
part, and the masses are reduced to manageable size by steel saws which
slip swiftly through them; then workmen tackle the imperishable stuff,
and with chisel and mallet split the sections thinner and thinner. It
comes away wonderfully true, and a mass of stone gives off flake after
flake until the solid rock has turned into a pile of dark grey slates,
clean and bright of cleavage and ready for the roof. Green-grey or
"abbey-grey" is the mass of the quarry output; but a generous production
of "green" is also claimed. This fine stuff runs in certain veins, and
offers a tone very beautiful and pleasant to the eye. Lastly, there are
the reds--jewels among slates--that shine with russet and purple. This
stone is rare, and can only be quarried in small quantities. All
varieties have the slightest porosity, and take their places among the
most distinguished slates in the world.