A pale glimmer of daylight showed round the next bend and in a moment we entered what looked like a large natural cave. The marks on the rock walls, however, showed that it had been hewn by hand. The cave was half-filled with water which slopped and heaved against the rocks as though seeking a way of escape. The sound of it was magnified by the rock walls so that it was scarcely possible to speak. Every now and then the shaft of daylight that came in through the narrow entrance of the cave was blocked as a wave heaved up and crowded into the cleft. Sometimes the sea spilled through in a white froth of surf and then the wind would whip a blinding sheet of spray across the cavern. Two packing cases stood on a flat ledge of rock which ran along one side of the water like a small landing stage. On the other side of the cave a stream of ochre-coloured water poured out of a hole — presumably the water pumped up from the lower levels.
'The entrance is quite wide below the surface of the water,' Manack shouted to me.
'Where's the barge?' I asked.
He pointed into the tumbled water. 'Down there,' he yelled. He went out on to the ledge by the cases and thrust his hand down into the water. He brought up a rubber pipe. 'She's fitted with tanks,' he called out to me. They're full of water at the moment. We empty them by compressed air.' He dropped the pipe back and shone his torch into a recess. There were half a dozen compressed air cylinders stacked there. 'We take her out submerged. The only thing above water is the man at the helm. Neat, eh? But it requires pretty calm weather.'
He went back up the adit to the shaft that led down to the Mermaid. 'You see now why I want the Mermaid gallery opened up. That submerged barge is all right, but it's cumbersome and too dependent on the weather.' We had reached the shaft and he led the way down. The rhythmic sound of the pump was louder even than the rumble of the sea in the cavern. As we reached the bottom, he said, 'Take my advice and just keep to the main adit, this shaft and the Mermaid gallery. Don't go exploring the other workings. God knows when the mine was first opened up. It was way back in the seventies. Father knows his way around. But he's the only one. And he admits that in all the years he's been here he doesn't know the whole mine It's an absolute rabbit warren. The seaward side of the main shaft has most of the really old workings. There are dozens of ways out on to the cliffs. They used to tunnel in for the ore. The cliff face looks like a cave dweller's settlement in Sicily. Inland from the main shaft the mine squeezes itself between Botallack and Come Lucky. It's more recent than the old cliff workings, but it's still pretty old and the galleries have collapsed in places.'
'I shan't go exploring,' I said. I was thinking of all that water lying above us in Come Lucky.
'Maybe not,' he said. 'But I thought I'd just warn you. You're a miner, I know. But I don't imagine the mines in the Rockies are honeycombed like these old Cornish mines.'
They certainly are not,' I said.
We were climbing up a narrow, sloping tunnel that twisted and turned as they had won the ore from the granite country that enclosed it on either side. In places the roof slanted up beyond the beam of my lamp. The remains of the timber used for sloping still clung in rotten beams to the rock. In other places the roof came down sharply and we had to bend almost double. Then suddenly we clambered over a shelf of rock and dropped into a much wider gallery that sloped gently.
Captain Manack stopped here and caught my arm. 'This is the upper end of the Mermaid,' he said. 'It runs direct from the main shaft. It's almost dead straight from the shaft to where it stops, half a mile under the sea. And it slopes up all the way so that at the shaft it's above sea level. See here. Look at this.' He directed his lamp on to the sides of the gallery. 'This is what Friar and Slim have been working at for over a year.' The sides of the gallery had been worked so that on either side there was a smooth-topped ledge. The work was recent. Down the centre of the gallery two steel cables rested in the sludge. 'We've built those ledges right the way out to the seaward end of the Mermaid,' Manack said. 'Most places we were able to hew it out of the rock, for the gallery is a pretty uniform width. Only occasionally we had to build it up.' His face under the glare of the lamp on his helmet was full of enthusiasm. He must have been the sort of small boy who was always blowing himself up with fireworks.