Louren nodded, and smiled at Tinus.
‘Satisfied?’
‘What will you do if you don’t find it - but it’s sort of lurking there? Like, ready to pounce, you know. Like in those science fiction books,’ Tinus hedged.
‘If it’s there, it will be thick. Every dust sample will be full of it. You can’t miss it under the microscope. A black, three-ball structure like a pawnbroker’s sign.’
‘Are you sure, Doc?’
‘I’m sure, Tinus.’
He took a deep breath, hesitated a moment longer, then nodded, ‘Okay, Doc. I’ll trust you,’ he said.
The buffeting, fluttering roar of the rock drills chased my agonized brain into a corner of my skull and started kicking it to a jelly. The party had ended in the early hours.
‘How are you feeling, Doc?’ Tinus van Vuuren came across to where I stood watching the work and shouted above the din. My nerves vibrated like guitar strings. Tinus looked as fresh and baby-faced as though his night cap had been hot milk and honey and he had slept twelve hours. I knew the type - Louren was one of them.
‘I feel bloody awful, thanks,’ I shouted back.
‘There won’t be anything to see here for a couple of days,’ Tinus told me. ‘Why don’t you go lie down for a bit, Doc.’
‘I’ll stick around,’ I said, which seemed to be the general sentiment. Louren piloted the course of the Sturvesant empire from the radio shack, unable to tear himself away from the City of the Moon. Sally made a few desultory attempts at cataloguing and filing, but these never lasted more than an hour or two and then she was back at the cavern. Ral and Leslie made no pretence, and spent all day in the cavern, except for brief simultaneous absences which Louren and I guessed were exercise periods.
Tinus was a top man in his trade, and his team cut the tunnel swiftly and skilfully. The walls were shaped smoothly and precisely. They were shored with heavy timbers baulks, and electric lights were strung along the roof. Thirty feet in, Tinus constructed a large chamber from which a new drive was made, aimed at the area behind the painting of the white king.
Tinus and I had made careful measurements and calculations, and we had decided exactly where we could expect to strike whatever the wall of masonry concealed.
The Bantu drill-men were warned of the need for respirators, and Tinus and I crouched behind them in the cramped rock tunnel as they began the assault on the last few feet of rock. Their backs were naked glistening bunches of black muscles as they worked the heavy drills. The noise in the confined space was thunderous, and despite the ventilation fans circulating air, the heat was appalling. The sweat poured down inside the face mask of my respirator, and the eye goggles were fogged and blurry.
The tension was becoming almost painful as the long steel bit of the drill hammered itself into the rock, sinking in inch by inch, the muddy lubricating water running back from the drill hole. I glanced sideways at Tinus. He appeared monstrous in the black rubber mask, but the blue eyes twinkled out of the eye glasses and he winked and held up a thumb in a gesture of assurance.
Suddenly the drill-man was thrown off balance, as the drill ran away with him. It slid, unresisted, into its hole, and he staggered wildly as he tried to control the enormous weight of steel. Tinus slapped his shoulder, and he slammed the valve of the drill closed. The silence was almost painful, and our laboured breathing was the only sound.
I saw my own excitement reflected in Tinus’s blue eyes. I nodded at him, and he turned and tapped the drill- men’s shoulders and jerked his thumb in a gesture of dismissal. They shuffled back, bowed in the low tunnel, and disappeared around the bend.
The two of us went forward and crouched at the face. Gingerly we withdrew the drill steel from its hole, and a wisp of fine dust followed it out, smoking in the harsh glare of the electric lights. Tinus and I exchanged glances. Then I jerked my head at Tinus. He nodded, and followed his gang back along the tunnel. I worked on alone at the face.
I used the long plastic rod, with a piece of sterile white cloth attached to the end of it, to probe the drill hole to its limit. It ran fourteen feet into the rock before meeting resistance, and when I withdrew it the cloth was thick with grey floury dust. I dropped it into the sample bottle, and attached another cloth to the rod. In all I collected six separate samples, before I followed Tinus back along the passage. There was a bench and an angle-poise lamp set up ready for me in the rock chamber. The microscope was under the light, with its mirror adjusted and it was the work of only a few minutes to smear my dust samples onto the slides and spread the red dye over them.
It was difficult to get a view into the eyepiece of the micro-scope through my befogged goggles. One quick scrutiny was sufficient, but I doggedly inspected all six samples before I ripped off my respirator and sucked big relieved breaths. Then I scampered down the passage and out into the cavern. They were all waiting for me, crowding around me eagerly. ‘We’ve drilled into a cavity,’ I shouted, ‘and it’s clean!’ Then they were on me, pounding my back and shaking my hand, laughing and chattering excitedly.
Louren would let no one else work with me at the face, though Ral and Sally were clearly breaking their hearts to do so.
The two of us worked carefully, slowly chipping away at the drill hole with chisel and four-pound hammer, enlarging it gradually until we had exposed a slab of dressed masonry. It was a massive slab of red sandstone which blocked off the end of our tunnel from floor to roof, and from wall to wall. It was obviously the lining of the cavity into which the drill had bored.
The drill hole cut through the centre of it like a single black eye-socket. All our efforts to peer through it were rewarded with a vista of impenetrable blackness and we had to content ourselves with the slower painstaking approach.
For three days we worked shoulder to shoulder, stripped to the waist, chipping steadily at the living rock until, despite our gloves, our hands were mushy with blisters and smeared skin. Slowly we exposed the massive slab over its full width and height, to find that it butted on either side against identical slabs and that it appeared to carry across its summit the cross-pieces of an equally massive stone lintel.
We used two fifty-ton hydraulic jacks to take the strain of the lintel off the slab. Then we drilled and attached
