Over Sea, Under Stone
Barney shut his eyes. Somehow, even though the cave was just as dark when his eyes were open, he found shutting them gave him a sense of being safer. Still touching the slippery wall with his finger-tips, he moved two or three paces forward. Simon followed him with one hand on his shoulder, staring ahead into the darkness but seeing as little as if a thick black curtain were hanging close before his face.
They went on into the cave for what seemed a long time. Every few moments Simon struck a match, and they moved forward while the dim light lasted, and for the few remembered paces after it flickered out. Once they tried to light the candle stump, but it only sputtered obstinately, so Simon put it back in his pocket.
The air was cold, but fresh on their faces. Although there was a smell all round them of salt and seaweed, as if they were under the sea, it was not difficult to breathe. The silence, like the darkness, seemed almost solid, broken only by their own footsteps, and an occasional echoing musical plop as water somewhere dripped from the roof of the cave.
As Simon was standing still, fumbling with the matchbox again, Barney felt the line round his waist jerk tight and dig into him; once, twice. “There’s two pulls on the line. It must be Jane. Ten minutes. Gosh, I thought we’d been in here for hours.”
“I’ll signal back,” Simon said. He struck a match and saw the line thin and taut in its light. Taking firm hold of it he gave two slow steady pulls on the direction from which they had come.
“Funny to think of Jane on the other end,” Barney said.
“I wonder how much there is left?”
“Gosh—d’you think we shall run out? How much line was there?”
“Quite a lot,” said Simon, more optimistically than he felt. “We’ve been going awfully slowly. Ow!” The match burned down to his fingers, and he dropped it hastily.
There was no hiss as it fell. As they moved on, groping, Simon suddenly realised that he had been listening for the noise.
“Stop a tick, Barney.” He scuffed at the ground with one foot and peered down. “The floor’s not wet any more.”
“My shoes still squelch,” Barney said.
“That’s the water inside them, idiot, not outside.” Simon’s voice boomed hollowly round the cave, and he hastily dropped it to a whisper again, half afraid that the noise might bring the roof down on them.
“The sides aren’t slimy here either,” Barney said suddenly. “It’s dry rock. It has been for some time actually, only I hadn’t really taken any notice.”
Another match fizzed alight as Simon held it to the one dying in his fingers. He held the flame close to the wall. They saw bare grey granite, veined here and there with a white sparkling rock, and no seaweed. The ground, when Barney stooped to touch it, was covered with a kind of dusty sand.
“We must be going uphill.”
“The sea can’t ever have come in this far.”
“But we heard it booming about from up the top, this morning. Does that mean we’ve come past the opening of the chimney bit?” Barney craned his neck back to look at the roof.
“I don’t think so,” Simon said uncertainly. “The noise would carry a long way. Hey, look ahead quick, this match is going out.”
Barney peered forward at the now-familiar picture that he was never afterwards to forget: of narrow shadow-swung walls tunnelling into the dark, holding them in a cramped, unfriendly grip. And in the second before the darkness came down on them again he thought he saw the curtain of shadow at the end nearer than it had been before.
He moved hesitantly forward, and then some instinct told him to stop. He put out his hand in the silent darkness. It met solid rock a few inches from his face. “Simon! It’s a dead end.”
“What?” Incredulity and disappointment rose in Simon’s voice. He struggled with the matches; he could feel the bottom of the box through them now, and realised that there could not be many left.
In the flickering light it was difficult to tell shadow from darkness, but they saw that the cave had not actually come to an end. Instead it changed, just in front of them, to a far narrower passage: tall and thin, with a great boulder wedged between its sides about three feet from the ground. Above their heads, out of reach, the cleft was open to the roof: but there was no way of climbing up to it. The boulder blocked their path.
“We’ll never get through that,” Simon said in despair. “There must have been a fall of rock since the Cornishman went through.”
Barney looked down at the forbidding dark gap that remained at the bottom of the cleft, jagged and sinister through the dancing shadows, and swallowed. He was beginning to wish very much that they were back in the sunlight again.
Then he thought of the grail, and then of Mr. Hastings’ face. “I can get through underneath, if I crawl.”
“No,” Simon said at once. “It’s dangerous.”
“But we can’t go back now.” Barney gained confidence as he began to argue. “We’ve got this far, we may be just a few feet away from it. I’ll come out again if it’s too narrow. Oh come on, Simon, let me try.”
The match went out.
“We haven’t got many left,” Simon said out of the darkness. “They’ll run out soon. We’ve just got to make that candle light, or we shall be stuck in the dark. Where are you?”
Groping his way along the line towards Barney, he took his hand and put the match-box into it. Then he felt in his own pocket for the stump of candle, rubbing its wick hopefully on his shirt to dry it. “Now light one of the matches.”
There was a noise behind them in the darkness, like a stone falling; a grating, rattling noise and then silence again.
“What was that?”
They listened nervously, but could hear only the sudden violent thumping of their own hearts. Barney struck a match, his hand shaking. The cave sprang into light again round them, with only the darkness pressing mockingly from the direction of the noise.
“It wasn’t anything,” Simon said at last. “Just a stone we must have brushed loose. Here.” He held the candle stub to the flame. The match burned right down, but still the candle wick only sputtered as it had before. They tried again, holding their breath, and this time the wick caught, and burned with a long smoking yellow flame.
“Hold these,” Barney said with determination. “I’m going in there.” He gave Simon back the last few loose matches and took the candle. “Look,” he said, shielding the smoking flame from the draught with his other hand. “It’s not so low really, I can go on my hands and knees.”
Simon peered at the entrance unhappily. “Well . . . for goodness’ sake be careful. And pull at the line if you get stuck, I’ll keep hold of it.”
Barney went down on his hands and knees and crawled into the dark opening beneath the wedged rock, holding the dangerously flickering candle in front of him. The draught seemed to be stronger now. The rock brushed his body on all sides, so that he had to keep his head down and his elbows in, and for a moment he almost panicked with the sense of being shut in.
But before the panic could take hold, the shadows looming round the one point of light changed their shape, and he raised his head without hitting the rock. He crawled a little farther, the floor rough and gritty under his knees; and found not only that he could stand upright but that the cave was much wider. The pool of light cast by his carefully guarded flame did not even show the walls on either side.
“Are you all right?” Simon’s anxious voice came muffled through the opening behind him.
Barney bent down. “It’s okay, it widens out again here, that must be an entrance. . . . I’m going on.”
He felt the line at his waist tighten as Simon jerked an answer and he set off slowly across the cave. The darkness opened before him in the small light from his inch of candle, already burning down and dripping hot wax over his finger-nails. When he glanced back over his shoulder he could no longer see the entrance from which he had come.
“Hallo,” Barney said tentatively into the darkness. His voice whi
spered back at him in a sinister, eerie way: not booming and reverberating round as it had in the narrow tunnel-like cave they had come through, but muttering far away, high in the air. Barney swung round in a circle, vainly peering into the dark. The space round him must be as big as a house—and yet he was in the depths of Kemare Head.
He paused, irresolute. The candle was burning down, soft between his fingers. The thought of the towering dark man in his strange empty house came back to him suddenly, and with it all the feeling of menace that surrounded their pursuers, the enemy, who so desperately wanted to keep them from finding the grail.
Barney shivered with fright and sudden cold. It was as if they were all round him in the silent darkness, evil and unseen, willing him to go back. His ears sang, even in the great empty space of the cave he felt that something was pressing him down, calling him insistently to turn away. Who are you to intrude here, the voice seemed to whisper; one small boy, prying into something that is so much bigger than you can understand, that has remained undisturbed for so many years? Go away, go back where you are safe, leave such ancient things alone . . . .
But then Barney thought of Great-Uncle Merry, whose mysterious quest they were following. He thought of all that he had said, right in the beginning, of the battle that was never won but never totally lost. And although he saw nothing but the shadows, and the blackness all around his small lonely pool of yellow light, he suddenly had a vivid picture of the knight Bedwin who had begun it all when he came fleeing to Cornwall from the east. In full armour he stood in Barney’s mind, guarding the last trust of King Arthur, chased by the same forces that were now pursuing them.
And Barney remembered the story that Bedwin was buried on Kemare Head, perhaps directly above the cave where he stood, and he was not frightened. There was friendliness round him in the dark now as well as fear.
So Barney did not turn back. He went on, sheltering his small dying light, into the dark that gave back in whispering echoes the sound of his own steps. And then, above his head, he became aware of a noise stranger than anything he had ever heard.
It seemed to come from nowhere, out of the air; a husky, unearthly humming, very faint and far-away, yet filling the whole cave. It wavered up and down, high and then low, like the wind that sings in the trees and telegraph-wires. As the thought flickered through Barney’s mind, he held the candle up and saw that over his head the roof opened into a kind of chimney, rising up and up and out of sight. He thought for an instant that he saw a point of light shining down, but his own light dazzled his eyes and he could never be sure. And he realised that the noise he could hear was the wind, far above, blowing over the hole in the rocks that they had found that morning. The singing down in the cave was the singing of the wind over Kemare Head.
It was almost by accident, as he was looking up, that he saw the ledge. It jutted out from the rocky side of the chimney at the end of the cave; a bump of rock beneath a hollow, like a kind of natural cupboard, just within his reach. Inside it, he saw the glint of candlelight reflected back from a shape that was not part of the rock.
Hardly daring to breathe, he reached up and found his hand touching the side of something smooth and curved. It rang beneath his finger-nail with the sound of metal. He grasped it and took it down, blinking at the dust which rose from the ledge as he did so. It was a cup, heavy and strangely shaped; swelling out from a thick stem into a tall bell-shape like the goblets he had seen pictured in his books about King Arthur. He wondered how the artists could have known. He could hardly believe that this, at last, must be the grail.
The metal was cold in his hand; dusty and very dirty, but with a dull golden sheen underneath the dirt. There was nothing else on the ledge.
The candle flickered suddenly. The wax felt soft and warm, and Barney guessed with a shock that it would burn for only a few moments more before he would be left alone in the dark. He turned away from the ledge to the direction from which he had come, and realised how lost he would have been without the line tied to his waist. The vast round chamber of the cave stretched out all round him into the dark; only the line, straight and thin, told him the way to go.
He walked towards it; the line dropped to the ground and then drew taut again. Simon must be pulling it in. Barney clutched the grail to him with one hand and held up the candle, now almost burned away, with the other. Excitement bubbled away any of the fears he had felt before. “Simon!” he called. “I’ve found it!”
There was no answer but his own voice, whispering back at him from the empty cave. “Found it . . . found it . . .” . . . a dozen voices, each his own, from every side.
And the light flickered, and went out.
The line stayed taut as Barney put his hand on it and walked slowly forward. “Simon?” he said uncertainly. Still there was no answer. For a moment he saw in his mind a terrible picture of Simon overpowered and helpless. And on the other side of the narrow passage in the rock, the tall sneering figure of Mr. Hastings, taking in the line as if he were playing a fish on a hook, and waiting . . . .
Barney’s throat felt suddenly dry. He held the grail tighter to him in the darkness, his heart thumping. Then he heard Simon’s voice, low down in the darkness before him and very muffled.
“Barney! . . . Barney?”
Barney put out his hand and felt the rock where the roof dropped suddenly to the narrow part of the cave. “I’m here . . . Simon, I’ve found it, I’ve got the grail!”
But all the muffled urgent voice said was, “Come on out, quick.”
Barney went down on his hands and knees, wincing again at the pressure of the sharp edges of the rock. Carefully he crawled into the crevice that separated the two parts of the cave, bumping his head in the dark on the low uneven roof.
He held the grail upright before him, but it knocked against the side of the rock and rang out, to his surprise, with a long musical note as clear and true as a bell.
He saw a dim glow lighting the farther end of the crack, and then the bright star of a match, and Simon crouching low and pulling in the line with his free hand. The shadows made his eyes look big and dark and alarmed. He stared as Barney emerged, forgetting everything at the sight of the tall cup.
Simon had been growing more and more anxious, and only the feel of Barney still moving at the other end of the line had stopped him from squeezing through the narrow gap himself. He had stood alone in the dark, straining for every sound, longing for light but forcing himself to keep the six remaining matches in his pocket for the journey back. It had seemed a very long time.
He took the cup from Barney’s hands. “I thought it would be a different shape, somehow . . . what’s this inside?”
“Where?”
“Look—” Simon felt inside the cup and brought out what looked at first like a short stick, almost as dark with age as the cup itself. It had been wedged between the sides, and Barney had not seen it in his haste.
“It’s very heavy. I think it’s made of lead.”
“What is it?”
“A kind of tube. Like the telescope case, only a lot smaller. It doesn’t seem to unscrew, though. Perhaps it just fits together.” Simon pulled experimentally at the tube, and suddenly one end of it came off like a cap: and wound in a roll inside they saw something very familiar indeed.
“It’s another manuscript!”
“So that’s what he meant when he said—” Simon broke off. He had taken hold of one end of the rolled parchment in an attempt to pull it out of the tube, and the edge had crumbled away at his touch. When sudden caution he jerked his hand away, and in the same instant remembered why he had called so anxiously for Barney to come out.
“We can’t touch it, it’s too old. And Barney, we’ve got to get out as quick as we can. Jane gave three pulls on the line just before you came back. The tide must be coming in. If we don’t get out soon we shall be cut off.”
As the boys disappeared into the mouth of the cave Jane had settled herself to lean against the lone
standing rock, amongst the wet pillows of seaweed and the grey-green sweep of flat granite causeway round the cliff. She tucked the telescope case carefully under her arm. Even though she had always been with Simon when he was carrying it about, she felt a peculiar unnerving sense of responsibility at the thought of what was inside.
Gradually she paid out the thin fishing-line from the neatly wound wad in her hand. The pressure on it was uneven, as if inside the cave the boys were moving forward and then stopping every few moments. She had to concentrate to keep the line from either pulling too tight or drooping loose on the ground.
It was very hot. The sun beat down over the towering grey cliff, and she felt the heat prickling along her skin. Even the rock she leant on was baked by the sun, and she could feel the warmth of it through her shirt on her back. Behind her, the water swished gently as it washed the edge of the uncovered rocks. There was no other sound anywhere, at the lonely foot of the headland with the sea stretching all around, and without the line moving in her hands Jane could have believed that she was the only person in the world. The land, and the Grey House, seemed very far away.
She wondered idly if their parents had come back from Penzance yet, and what they would think when they found the house completely empty, with nothing to show where anyone had gone.
She thought of the three figures they had seen striding out over Kemare Head, led by the frightening Mr. Hastings, black and long-legged like some giant insect. Instinctively she looked up at the cliff. But there was no sound, no movement, only the great grey sweep of rock that leant over her in permanent unmoving menace, with the green cap of grass on the headland at the top, two hundred feet above.
And then Great-Uncle Merry followed them into her mind. Where was he? Where had he gone this time? What, so near the end of the quest, could possibly have been important enough to take him away? Never for one moment did Jane think that he could have come to any harm, or have been captured by the enemy. She remembered too clearly the utter confidence with which Great-Uncle Merry had swept her into his arms on the midnight headland: “They dare not follow if I am here . . . .”