He nodded. 'Yep.'
I fell silent then, watching that crazy contraption move steadily down the wet gallery that ran out under the sea. My guess was they'd never been down the Mermaid last night. Captain Manack had known where his father had gone and he'd made straight for the old workings. I felt uneasy. They'd discovered something; something the old man had been up to. Fair makes me sweat to think about it. I glanced closely at Friar, wondering whether he was thinking about it now. He was staring in front of him, his big, calloused hand clenched on the guard rail. Well, whatever they'd found, the old man was out of harm's way now.
The carriage slowed. The great timber beams of the scaffolding showed in the lights of our lamps. I went to have a look at the effect of the previous day's blast. The trickling sound of water was loud now that the carriage was not bumping and swaying along the ledges. There were several inches of water on the floor of the gallery. We sloshed through it. The timbers across the pit were piled high with rubble. The charge had blown out more than I had expected. I directed the beam of my lamp to the roof. Everything was covered with a thick film of rock dust. It had mingled with the water to form a slimy grey paste. One of the scaffolding timbers had been split by the blast. Water streamed down from the shaft. I picked up a piece of rock from the floor.
It was granite all right. But it was streaked with basalt.
'Wot's up, mate?' Friar asked.
'The rock's weaker here,' I told him.
'Dangerous?' he asked.
'Maybe,' I said. 'Let's go up and have a look.'
We set ladders up into the freshly blown section of the shaft and clambered up. The rock was faulty. You didn't need to be an expert to see that. It was streaked with veins of basalt and cracked with the force of the explosion. Through a thousand minute crevices the water was seeping. It splashed on our helmets, on our upturned faces and sizzled as drops struck the naked flames of our lamps. It streamed down the walls so that they glistened like burnished steel. 'Don't look too safe to me. Friar said. "Ow much rock is there between us an' the sea?'
I glanced at the rock walls, measuring with my eye the height added to the shaft by last night's blow. 'About fifteen feet according to Captain Manack's reckoning,' I told him.