The Monster’s Throat
Three days had passed since I finished analyzing the drilling data.
I figured it wouldn’t be easy, but… this is more finicky than I expected.
Once the drill struck the quartz layer at the 340-meter mark, we’d been unable to push any deeper.
The problem was simple.
The borehole was only twenty centimeters in diameter.
No matter how massive a drilling rig was, the hole it carved remained narrow.
The machine was large because it took tremendous power to lower and rotate steel pipe hundreds of meters underground, not because it was meant to carve out a wide shaft.
In the end, a borehole was nothing more than a thin tunnel bored through bedrock by a drill bit grinding away at stone.
No person could descend through such a tight opening, and even if we lowered a camera, its limited view made it impossible to grasp the full shape of the vein.
We’d confirmed that quartz was there, but how much gold lay inside it, and in what direction the vein stretched, was something only direct inspection could tell us.
Under normal circumstances, we’d have to dig a separate vertical shaft beside the borehole—a mine shaft, in proper mining terms, a shaft—wide enough for a person to descend.
A vertical passage more than two meters across.
It would let men and equipment move up and down, and it would also be used to hoist ore to the surface.
But the real issue was how long it would take to sink such a shaft down to 340 meters.
By traditional methods, it would take months, at the very least.
We’d have to blast, haul up rock, reinforce the walls, then blast again, repeating the process hundreds of times before a conventional shaft could be completed.
The cost was astronomical, too.
Equipment rental, labor, safety systems… no matter how flush with cash you were, burning money for months while you waited was never a desirable option.
But I had one more method at my disposal.
That was to use the map I’d found in Wishville’s abandoned warehouse.
“Foreman Armstrong, what if we use the old workings?”
I pointed to the map tacked to the wall of the field office.
It was an overlay of the 1920s map I’d found in the warehouse and the official USGS mining records.
Armstrong let out a low groan.
“The old workings? You mean that worn-out map you mentioned before, sir?”
“Yes. This area was heavily mined for gold in the 1880s. Records left behind by the miners and geologists at the time should be useful, don’t you think?”
“Those records are more than a hundred years old. Can we trust them?”
“We followed those records and found a freshly living gold vein, didn’t we? And besides, there’s no harm in trying.”
I took out a pointer and tapped several spots on the map.
“Here, here, here, and here. These points are marked as Greenhell Shaft No. 2. According to the record, it was opened in 1882 and abandoned in 1891. Its depth was around 280 meters.”
“Greenhell, huh. Could that be the same Greenhell we know? The energy company, I mean.”
I shrugged at Armstrong’s question.
“Could be, could not be. Doesn’t matter either way. Whatever it is, this mine belongs to us now.”
“Strictly speaking, it belongs to you, sir. Still, 280 meters… that’s substantial. It leaves only about sixty meters to the target. But there’s no guarantee it actually exists, and even if it does, it may be collapsed or flooded.”
“Like I said earlier—no harm in trying.”
“……”
If the passages marked on this old treasure map still existed, we’d strike it rich. If they didn’t, then we’d have to dig there anyway, so we might as well grit our teeth and go through with it.
The entrance to the old workings was about two hundred meters northeast of our drilling site.
In truth, I’d known this place existed ever since I looked at the map.
But whether it would be useful to us was something I couldn’t know until the drilling data came in.
A mine shaft was just a hole dug into the ground.
What mattered was whether that hole connected to the vein, and if you didn’t know exactly where the vein lay, there was no way to judge.
Once the drilling results pointed to the quartz layer at 340 meters, the old map finally became worth comparing against it.
I went on, “I know old workings are dangerous. But isn’t it more efficient to maintain something already dug than to start from bare earth and sink a new shaft?”
“Hmm.”
Armstrong studied the map in detail.
After a long silence, he spoke slowly.
“We’ll need to inspect the entrance first. Abandoned mines from this era often just had the opening sealed off while the interior was left as is.”
“Then I suppose there’s reason to hope it isn’t beyond restoration. Let’s go see it ourselves.”
“Understood. I’ll find the entrance right away.”
***
To get to the point: the map was right, and not just right—remarkably accurate.
About five minutes from our drilling site, up a slope thick with brush and tangled undergrowth, I found the entrance to a century-old mine.
Beyond the ruins of a collapsed stone wall, moss-covered granite boulders lay mixed with mounds of dirt, covering the hillside.
A few blackened wooden posts jutted up between them.
Armstrong began working through the rubble of the wall.
“This is the old pit mouth. The structure that sealed it off must have collapsed over the years.”
I put on gloves and started clearing away the stones as well.
After about thirty minutes of digging, darkness opened its mouth.
A rectangular hole, about a meter and a half wide and two meters tall.
Cold, stale air burst out from inside.
The sharp smell of mold, rotten wood, and old bat droppings—an acrid ammonia stink—stabbed at my nose.
Armstrong switched on his flashlight and shone it inside.
The beam was swallowed by the dark.
The tunnel ran underground at a gentle incline.
Old timbering lined the walls and ceiling at regular intervals on both sides.
They’d been installed back in the 1880s.
The wood had soaked up moisture and turned black, and some of it had already rotted halfway away.
“It’s in better shape than I expected,” Armstrong muttered.
A faint smile spread across his face.
“You were right, sir. Some sections are probably completely caved in, but… well, this much we can probably reinforce as we go.”
***
For the next week, we focused on restoring the old workings.
The first task was ventilation.
After being sealed for more than a century, the tunnel could easily contain thin oxygen and toxic gases.
Methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide… if even one of them was present at a high concentration, a man would be done for.
We installed a forty-centimeter ventilation duct beside the pit mouth and used a large surface blower to force fresh air in.
Whoooosh!
Three hundred cubic meters of air per minute poured into the tunnel.
The contaminated air escaped through natural fractures on the opposite side of the workings.
After two days of ventilation, we went in with gas detectors to check the air quality.
Oxygen concentration: 20.8 percent. Methane: 0.02 percent. Carbon monoxide: undetected.
With the air meeting safety standards, the second task was reinforcing the supports.
We inspected each rotten timber support one by one and replaced the dangerous ones with new steel supports.
The method was to place H-beams against the ceiling, push them up with hydraulic jacks, then drive anchors into both walls and lock them in place.
This was the most time-consuming part.
The total length of the tunnel exceeded six hundred meters, and roughly half of it needed reinforcement.
The third task was installing lighting and communications.
We fixed explosion-proof low-voltage lights to the walls every twenty meters.
The bulbs were sealed inside thick glass and wire mesh, so even if sparks flew inside, they wouldn’t ignite any flammable gas outside.
We also installed wired telephone lines.
Radio signals didn’t travel well that deep underground.
We placed emergency phones on the walls every fifty meters.
Finally, we cleared the debris from the tunnel floor.
Broken rocks, rotting timber, pooled water…
We brought in a small excavator and a sump pump to clean the passage thoroughly.
We laid steel plates along the floor to make movement easier.
It took a total of ten days to complete all the restoration work.
And now, here we were—Armstrong and I, descending underground through the restored old workings.
“It feels like we’re entering the belly of the earth.”
“It does, doesn’t it.”
I moved slowly, recalling the geology I’d picked up in Harvard’s liberal arts courses.
The tunnel began as a gentle slope, then shifted into a steeper section with wooden steps installed in the middle.
The new steel supports we’d put in gleamed coldly in the light of the explosion-proof lamps.
Between them, the hundred-year-old black timber supports stood their ground like a legacy from an older generation.
Steel plates clanged under our feet.
The air was cold and damp.
The deeper we went, the more the temperature dropped.
If the surface had been twenty-five degrees Celsius, then this was probably around fifteen now.
The light from the headlamp on my helmet lit the way ahead.
“Current depth: 180 meters,” Armstrong said, checking the altimeter.
“We’re about halfway there.”
There were old scribbles and markings left all over the walls.
-R.I.P. THOMAS FINCH — CRUSHED, LEVEL 4, 1886
-GOD FORGIVE US
-$2.50 A DAY AND MY LUNGS
-MARY I WILL COME HOME
-13 DEAD THIS YEAR — WHO’S NEXT?
-DON’T DIG EAST!
-JAKE OWES ME 40 CENTS — BILLY
.
.
Traces left behind by miners a hundred years ago.
Once, they too must have walked through this darkness dreaming of gold.
Most of them probably went back empty-handed, and some of them were no longer even in this world.
“Sir, let’s take a short break.”
Armstrong pointed to an emergency shelf installed on the wall.
It was a makeshift rest stop we’d built during the restoration work.
There were two folding chairs, a water container, and an emergency oxygen tank.
We rested there for fifteen minutes before setting out again.
The tunnel gradually narrowed, and the ceiling grew lower.
In some sections, we had to stoop to get through, probably because the average height of miners in the 1880s was shorter than ours.
“Current depth: 260 meters.”
Armstrong reported again.
“If the old records are right, we should be reaching the end of the tunnel soon.”
He was right.
Before long, the blocked end of the tunnel came into view.
It was a stone wall, with the unmistakable marks of unfinished digging still visible on it.
Shining his flashlight across it, Armstrong said, “This looks like the end. It was probably sealed when the mine was abandoned in 1891.”
“……”
I slowly ran my hand over the stone wall.
A hundred years ago, with the technology they had then, the people who reached this point must have kept digging by hand until the very last moment of exhaustion.
They probably used shovels and pickaxes.
Then they would have swung their pickaxes into the rock wall again and again until they finally ran out of strength and turned back.
I was standing at the very spot where someone, a hundred years ago, must have dug with desperate hope until he finally gave up and walked away.
There wasn’t any grand reason behind what I did next.
Just a kick—something any blood-hot man might feel like trying once.
I kicked the stone wall where the pickaxe marks remained.
“H-hey? Sir, the ground is still unstable, so this could be dangerous—”
The moment Armstrong tried to stop me—
Thud.
A strange sensation struck the sole of my foot.
“Huh?”
The section of wall I’d kicked crumbled away with a faint tremor.
Rumble!
With a heavy vibration, a pile of stones poured down in an instant.
“……”
I stared, my mouth half open, at the space exposed so absurdly easily beyond the wall.
Another chamber opened up behind the tunnel the miners had dug a hundred years ago.
A hidden passage, yawning like a black mouth.
Maybe the miners from a century ago had turned back with just one more swing of the pickaxe left in them.
“Good Lord…”
Armstrong’s jaw dropped.
The deep underground, sealed away for more than a hundred years—no, sealed since the dawn of human history—was now revealed.
The air that rushed out from inside was no longer of the surface world.
It carried a deeper, older, more alien smell.
Armstrong shone his flashlight into the passage.
Wherever the beam struck, I could see supports older than the ones installed in the 1880s.
No—those were less like supports and more like rough stacks of naturally cut stone.
Something like mud had been smeared between the rocks, and the method of supporting the ceiling was primitive in a way completely unlike modern mining techniques.
“This… this… this doesn’t look like something dug by nineteenth-century miners. It looks like it was made by people much older than that. Like primitives…” Armstrong muttered, bewildered.
I swept the wall with my flashlight.
There were marks showing that bedrock had been carved away, but not the cuts left by pickaxes or chisels.
They were bizarre, irregular gouges, as if the rock had been smashed again and again by some primitive tool, almost like a stone axe.
I shone the light deeper into the opening.
The tunnel stretched further downward.
It sloped gently and disappeared into the abyss.
“A path from a primitive civilization that even the 1800s miners couldn’t find… this feels less like a mine and more like something for anthropologists.”
Armstrong was right.
I tried to imagine why ancient primitives had dug such a deep hole into the earth.
Maybe they fled underground to escape an ice age, or perhaps they were excavating some great hero’s tomb—one now forgotten in the transmission of generations.
And maybe, in the middle of digging, they encountered something dangerous and vanished forever.
…If we keep going down, what if we run into a dinosaur or a stone face or something?
That would change the genre of my life completely.
“Well, let’s go down first. Call everyone and bring the safety gear.”
After some thought, I made my decision.
Only after inspecting the atmosphere beyond the tunnel and confirming that the machine made no warning sounds did Armstrong finally nod.
At a point roughly sixty meters from the strata we believed contained gold, we were about to dive into an abyss that felt like the throat of a mythic monster.
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