Reggie got a crowbar and tried to get an edge under a lip of limestone. He used a rock as a fulcrum but the block still wouldn’t budge. Sweating, he declared, “Right! I’m getting the bloody digger.”
It took an hour for Reggie to use the mechanical digger to make its own ramp to get down low enough to safely reach the block.
When he was in position, close enough to reach the rock with the bucket and far enough from the edge of the cutting to avoid a cave-in, he called out from the cab to say he was ready. Over the sputter of the diesel engine, the bells were pealing for the None service.
Reggie nudged the teeth of the bucket against an edge of limestone and caught hold on his first pass. He curled the bucket toward its arm and the stone block lifted.
“Hang on!” Atwood shouted. Reggie froze the action. “Get a crowbar in there!”
Martin jumped in and slid the iron bar into the gap between the limestone and the flooring stones. He leaned into the bar but couldn’t lever it an inch. “Too heavy!” he shouted.
With Martin applying steady pressure, Reggie moved the bucket again and the stone slid a foot, then another. Martin guided it with the crowbar and when it shifted enough to be stable waved his arms like a crazy man. “Stop! Stop! Come here! Come here!”
Reggie killed the engine and all of them scrambled into the pit.
Dennis saw it first. “Bloody hell!”
Timothy shook his head. “Would you look at that!”
While the rest of them stared, agog, Reggie relit a dog end he had saved in his shirt pocket and took a deep drag of tobacco. “Fuck me. Is that supposed to be there, Prof?”
Atwood stroked his thinning head of hair in wonder and simply said, “We’re going to need some light.”
They were staring into a deep black hole, and the oblique rays of the afternoon sun were revealing what appeared to be stone stairs descending into the earth.
Dennis ran back to the camp to retrieve every battery-powered flashlight he could find. He returned, red- faced and huffing, and passed them around.
Reggie was feeling protective of his old boss so he insisted on going first. He’d cleared a few of Rommel’s underground bunkers in his day and knew his way around a tight space. The rest of them followed the big man in single file, with Beatrice, stripped of her usual bravado, timidly taking up the rear.
When they had all successfully navigated the tightly spiraled stairway that plunged, by Atwood’s estimate, an incredible forty to fifty feet straight into the earth, they found themselves huddled in a room not much larger than two London taxicabs. The air was stagnant, and Martin, who was prone to claustrophobia, immediately felt desperate. “It’s a bit close down here,” he whimpered.
They were all moving their flashlights around and the beams intersected like searchlights during the blitz.
Reggie was the first to realize there was a door. “Hallo! What’re you doing here?” He studied the worm-holed surface with his flashlight. A huge iron key protruded from a gaping key hole.
Atwood set his light on it and said, “In for a penny, in for a pound. You game?”
Young Dennis crept up close. “Absolutely!”
“All right then,” Atwood said. “Your honor, Reggie.”
From her squashed position in the rear, Beatrice couldn’t see what was happening. “What? What are we doing?” Her voice was strained.
“We’re opening a ruddy big door,” Timothy explained.
“Well, hurry up,” Martin insisted, “or I’m going back up. I can’t breathe.”
Reggie turned the key and they heard the clunk of a mechanism. He pressed his palm against the cool wooden surface but the door wouldn’t move. It resisted his efforts until he put the full weight of his shoulder into it.
It slowly creaked open.
They shuffled through as if they were on a chain gang, and all of them started sweeping the new space with their beams.
This room was larger than the first, much larger.
Their minds assembled the scrambled stroboscopic images into something cohesive, but seeing wasn’t tantamount to believing, at least at first.
No one dared to speak.
They were in a high-domed chamber the size of a conference hall or a small theater. The air was cool, dry and stale. The floor and walls were fashioned from large blocks of stones. Atwood took note of these structural features, but it was a long wooden table and bench that jolted him. He moved his light over it from left to right and estimated that the table was over twenty feet long. He moved closer until his thighs touched it. He shone his light on its surface. There was an earthenware pot, the size of a teacup, with a black residue. Further down the bench there was a second pot, a third, a fourth.
Could it be?
It occurred to Atwood to cast his beam beyond the table.
There was another table. And behind it another. And another. And another.
His mind reeled. “I believe I know what this is.”
“I’m all ears, Prof,” Reggie said in a low voice. “What the bloody hell is it?”
“It’s a scriptorium. An underground scriptorium. Simply amazing.”
“If I knew what that meant,” Reggie said, sounding irritated, “I’d know what this is, wouldn’t I.”
Beatrice explained with awe, “It’s where monks copied manuscripts. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the first subterranean one ever discovered.”
“You are not mistaken,” Atwood said.
Dennis was reaching for an ink pot but Atwood stopped him. “Don’t touch. Everything must be photographed in situ, exactly as we find it.”
“Sorry,” Dennis said. “Do you think we’ll find any manuscripts down here?”
“Wouldn’t that be marvelous,” Atwood said, his voice trailing off. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
They decided to split into two parties to explore the boundaries of the chamber. Ernest took the three undergraduates to the right, and Atwood led Reggie and Beatrice to the left. “Careful as you go,” Atwood warned.
He counted each row of tables as he passed, and when he’d counted fifteen, saw that Reggie was casting his light on another large door at the rear of the room. “Fancy going through there?” Reggie asked.
“Why not?” Atwood answered. “However, nothing can top this.”
“It’s probably the bloody water closet,” Beatrice joked nervously.
They were practically pressing against Reggie as he lifted the weighty latch and pulled the door open.
All at once they shone their flashlights in.
Atwood gasped.
He felt faint and literally had to sit down on the stone floor. His eyes began to well up.
Reggie and Beatrice held onto each other for support, two opposites attracting for the first time.
From a distant corner they heard the others urgently shouting, “Professor, come here. We’ve found a catacombs!”
“There’s hundreds of skeletons, maybe thousands!”
“Goes on forever!”
Atwood couldn’t answer. Reggie took a few steps back to make sure his boss was all right. He leaned over, helped the older man to his feet and boomed out in his loudest military baritone, “Sod the skeletons, you lot! You’d all better come over here ’cause you’re not going to believe what we’ve got ourselves into.”
Atwood’s first thought was that he was dead, that he had inhaled some toxic vapors and died. He wasn’t a religious man but this had to be some sort of otherworldly experience.
No, this was real. If the first chamber was the size of a theater, the second was the size of an airline hangar. To his left, a mere ten feet from the door, was a vast wooden case, filled with enormous leather-bound volumes. To his right was an identical stack, and in between the two was a corridor just wide enough for a man to pass. Atwood recovered his senses and traced one stack with his flashlight to understand its dimensions. It was about fifty feet long, some thirty feet high, and consisted of twenty shelves. He did a rapid count of the number of books on just
