001: The Moho

The workers noticed him because he was a white man. He did not appear to be lost or wandering, but he was circling the opening to the Mandela Mine, now abandoned this past decade. At one point the mine had represented the economic hope of the South African government. Assured both gold and diamonds would be found in the depths of the Earth’s crust. Unfortunately, neither eventuality proved out. Now there were workers half a mile away, exploiting the older De Beers Mine with the same hopes that fed the excavation of the Mandela, albeit with a little more success.

His name was Aldon McIntyre, he answered with mild annoy­ance to Allie, and he was twenty-nine years old. On the verge of a zero year, when men have been known to do the unexpected and even the off-beat—divorce or an abrupt change of employment, among others—he had taken leave from his job as a water quality expert for the state of Iowa to engage in his pastime, which was geology. He had a varied experience in outdoor activities—including SCUBA diving and spelunking. He knew his way around, but he was hardly an expert. An affection for nature and an attendant curiosity led him to explore.

Allie had an active outdoors physique; six foot two and wiry, with a tan adequate to the sunlight of South Africa. To prevent his dark brown hair from blocking his vision at a critical moment, he kept it short, not quite enough to comb. He had attired himself for heat and roughness: sturdy black boots, light blue work denims, and a gray gym shirt with the sleeves torn off just below the deltoids. A camouflage bush hat kept the sun off his head. Still, to a stranger and even to a few of those who knew him, he might have been anyone, a nondescript pedestrian on the crowded path of life. Even the work­ers returned to their duties, for he was clearly interested in a cause they had long ago given up for dead.

The electricity was still on at the mineshaft; the lights in the office declared this to be so. He stood midway between the cargo elevator that deposited workers and equipment almost three miles below and the blue-and-rust rental car with his backpack, pickax, and two hundred yards of coiled yellow nylon rope. Here he hesitated: there might be no coming back from what he was about to do. He might easily turn around and drive back to Johannesburg with no one the wiser to his lack of heart; he had simply wanted to get away for a while. He thought about that for a few moments, until perspira­tion began to bead on his forehead. That decided him; he had after all come this far.

With the backpack situated, the pickax dangled from his canvass equipment belt along with a Swiss army knife, a battery-powered flashlight, and two filled canteens of dark green plastic. With coils of rope looped over his left shoulder, Allie headed for the elevator and the buttons that controlled it. He was just about to step aboard when the peremptory demand reached his ears.

“Wat maak jy?”

He paused and turned around.

She was chestnut-brown with eyes like anthracite, and she was dressed in miner’s garb: loose-fitting, pale turquoise pullover and rugged blue denims that looked as if they had been in a store not two days ago, and scuffed, brown hiking boots. Despite the work attire, she was no miner. Her fine black hair was loose and just a little dusty; for a miner, it should have been shorter, to avoid inadvertent tangles with equipment that could snap her neck. She carried herself fully erect, and might have been a descendant of the great Cetewayo, whose Zulu army had slaughtered the British at Isandlwana almost 150 years earlier. She had that kind of demeanor. Fists on hips, she was almost, but not quite, hostile, needing only a spark to set her off.

Allie shook his head. He recognized the language as Afrikaans, but he spoke only a few words of Dutch, the most important ena­bling him to locate the toilet and to purchase another beer. “Ik ben een Amerikaan,” he tried, with a poor accent.

Taking a couple steps closer, she switched to Queen’s English, with a very faint Cockney flavor to it. “I asked you what the bloody hell you were doing,” she snapped. “This mine is closed.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You have to leave here.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

The question seemed irrelevant to her. “My name is Thadie Mayane,” she growled. “More important, however, is my title. I am the Assistant Site Forewoman. Now, get back into your vehicle and leave this area. You have no business here.”

Allie closed to within a pace of her and handed her a business card, which she reluctantly accepted. At this distance, he saw she came within two or three inches of his height, but her fierce attitude made her appear taller.

“Aldon McIntyre?” she read aloud. “Water Quality Testing?” She tossed the card back at him; it fluttered to the ground. Ironic laughter colored her tone. “There’s no bloody water here. Look around you. Do you see any water?”

“It could be subterranean.”

Her black eyebrows rutted, and her voice dropped half an octave. “What?”

“It might be underground.”

Her thin lips twisted in the rictus of a snarl. “I bloody well know what ‘subterranean’ means.”

Without taking his eyes from her, Allie bent and retrieved the card. “I want to take some samples from the shaft,” he explained—a lie, of course, but she would not know that. “If there was once water in the ground, it might be brought back under certain conditions, and wells might be dug to bring it up. That might change the land, don’t you think?”

“Umbhedo,” she muttered.

He did not speak a word of Zulu, but the tone in which she uttered the word left no doubt as to its meaning. Yeah, well, I didn’t believe it, either, he thought.

Still, she temporized, just a little, and cleaned up her language.

“At the bottom of the mine, they were digging a spur, a hori­zontal tunnel,” she said. “They ran into a vein of quartz. The floor of that tunnel gave way, and there was some damage to the lower shaft. Fortunately, no work was being done down there at the time. Inspec­tors went down to assess the damage. It was decided to close the mine and cut the losses of the investment. Nobody has been down there since. That was—”

“Almost two years ago,” he said. “I did some research.”

Her response bit. “Of course you did.”

“I’m going down,” he insisted.

She turned her face away and spat her words at the dusty ground. “Shit,” she hissed. “Shit, shit, shit.” After blowing a sigh, she raised her face again. “I reckon I can’t stop you without a fight,” she said. “And by the time the police get here, if they come out at all, you’ll already be all the way down. So all right. I know the mine. I worked it when I first started here. I’ll go with you. Just…just don’t touch anything. I’ll operate the lift.”

“Fair enough.”

“A word of caution, Meneer McIntyre. I have a black belt in jiu-jitsu. If you…try anything, you’ll be left down there, and not in very good condition.”

He stuck with the lie. “All I want to do is take some samples from the mineshaft walls, Mej Mayane.”

They boarded the lift, and she pushed the correct two green buttons. Power kicked in immediately, and they began to descend, slowly at first, before gradually picking up speed. Machinery whined and rasped unnervingly, and Allie felt as if he were poised on the edge of a precipice, which in a manner of speaking, he was. Two strings of lights along the shaft lit their way. Already the heat gradi­ent stifled the air. Where he was struggling to breathe, she scarcely seemed to notice the temperature.

“You know it’s over four kilometers down,” she hinted, still testing his resolve.

“Which means it will be warmer by about sixty degrees Celsius,” he added, and finished disingenuously, 

“Which is why I only need to go down a mile or so.”

She frowned, thoughtful. “So you don’t know?”

“What’s that?”

“The measurements are in metric,” she told him, with mock patience, as if he should have known. “Temperature increases by about twenty-five degrees Celsius for every kilometer of depth. During the excavations, we had a cooling system so people could work. Even so, we…lost a few. But the point is, once you go below about two kilometers—not quite a mile and a half—the temperature starts to go down, not up. It’s around thirty-five to forty degrees Celsius at the bottom.”

“Which is what, a hundred and five or so in Fahrenheit?”

Mayane shrugged. “About that, I reckon.”

“That’s…unlikely,” Allie said, puzzled.

She turned to stare at him. “Meneer McIntyre, are you calling me—”

“No,” he hastened to say. “No, not at all. It just seems…”

She softened. “It does. And I agree. But it is true.”

“Then let’s go all the way to the bottom,” he said, masking his relief in a casual tone. Now he could abandon part of the lie. “The further down we go, the more reliable my samples should be.” He gave her a sidelong look, and decided to relieve the tedium with a conversation, if she would cooperate. “You said you started out in this mine?”

Mayane answered readily enough. “When I was sixteen,” she replied. “Six hour shifts daily, six hours of school five days a week. I managed to save a little even after I gave half my earnings to my parents. The savings, plus a scholarship to the University of Zululand, plus a lot of sweat here, led to three promotions. When the Site Foreman retires, in about five years, I have a shot at that position.”

She fell silent, and did not ask to know anything of him. The lift lurched a little, startling them both, but it quickly recovered.

“Ghosts,” he said.

Under her dark skin, she blanched. She flashed at him a stricken look. “Don’t say that!”

He quickly apologized, adding, “I don’t understand.”

She spoke barely above a whisper. “All mineshafts are the abodes of those who have died in them.”

Allie decided not to challenge her belief. Doubtless it was intensely tribal. He tried to change the subject.

“I’ve loved caves and caverns and mineshafts ever since I was a little boy. But I rarely got to see any. We moved around a lot. When I finally went off to college, I majored in organic chemistry at the behest of my father, but I snuck in a minor in geology, which was my first love. Unfortunately, there were few opportunities for me in either field—and my grades were not good enough to get me into—”

The lift lurched again, and this time it trembled, as if something above it were about to come loose.

“It’s all right,” Mayane said, not very convincingly. “This some­times happens.”

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” he said. “After this one, I would have panicked.”

She gazed out at the passing mineshaft. “What makes you think I’m not?” she asked.

That, more than the behavior of the machinery, shook Allie. This was her territory. If she was concerned about it, what did that bode for him? Once again he wondered whether he should have turned back while he still had the chance. With metal groaning above him, he had to consider the age and maintenance of the equipment. Still, Mayane had thought it safe enough to descend; that had to count for something.

Allie dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “How far down are we now?” he asked her.

Still peering out and down, she gave a light shrug. “We just passed the marker for one and a half kilometers.”

He tried a shaky grin. “I’m looking forward to that temperature drop.”

Her hair fluttered. “Do you feel that?” she asked.

“A very light breeze,” he said. “Almost imperceptible.”

She gnawed an incisor at her lower lip. “There shouldn’t be anybloody breeze. We’re descending at the rate of six kilometers an hour. That won’t send air through this screen.”

Mayane leaned forward to take a better look below. In that moment, the lift shook again, and she stumbled. Before she could right herself, Allie caught her and held her up. He was going to wait until she had set her feet, but she said, icily, “You can let go of me, Meneer.”

Allie withdrew himself swiftly, and raised his hands in defense. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t…”

Ignoring him now, she leaned forward once more and looked down. Keeping his distance, Allie joined her at the lift door and fol­lowed her eyes. He had no idea what she was looking for or what she was seeing below. He himself saw only a darkness poorly lit by the two strings of lights.

“Anything?” he asked.

The sound of his voice intruded into an uneasy silence. She did not look at him, nor did she respond. Neither did she slow the lift. He stepped back to the rear of the lift and left her alone with her worries. Despite leaning, her spine was rigid, a harsh response to his touch. His lips puffed out with his sigh. He had only meant to prevent her from falling.

White man, he thought, and black woman. Time had made the chasm too wide to cross. Although he had meant nothing untoward in saving her from falling, he was confronting an ingrained hostility born of centuries of oppression. He had not come to South Africa to ease that hostility, but it had reared its ugly head outside in the dust and here in the lift, and there was nothing he would be allowed to do about it.

“What are you looking for?” he tried.

She did not turn around. “I’m looking for anything that would explain this breeze,” she replied. “It’s growing stronger. Can’t you feel it?”

“Not back here, no. What does the air smell like?”

She tested it with an audible sniff. “I-I’m not sure.”

That uncertainty, too, scared him. If she, the expert, did not know…

“Decay, decomposition, peaches?”

Mayane barked a laugh. Her shoulders trembled. “P-peaches?” She turned back around. “You said peaches?”

Allie spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know, pick a smell.”

She considered. “There is a very slight fruity scent to it.”

“Somebody’s spoiled lunch?”

“No. I told you, no one was down there when the floor of the spur collapsed. Ergo, no lunch.”

“Ergo?”

“It’s Latin for ‘therefore.’”

“I bloody well know what it means,” he snapped.

Shocked momentarily, she burst into a full-bodied laugh. After it waned, she said, “I guess I’ve asked for that. Look, I’m sorry. You meant no harm. It’s just that…well…”

“I think I understand.”

“I think maybe you do, at that.” A marker passed upwards. “Two kilometers,” she announced.

“Halfway there.”

Once more the uneasy silence returned. Allie no longer concerned himself with it. Although he was sweating profusely now, the temperature seemed to be dropping, just as she had said. It might have been his imagination; he hoped not. A hundred degrees was just a number; the heat it represented was daunting. His skin began to cool, ever so slightly. He did not question how that could be, but accepted it gratefully.

“Two and a half,” she said.

The temperature definitely was falling. She did not say I told you so. Taking a chance, he joined her at the door, once more at arm’s length. Now the breeze, though very warm, chilled him, for the skin of his face was still moist. He could not help but notice Mayane’s face barely had a sheen to it. He decided not to comment; there were enough differences between them.

“Three kilometers.”

This time, Allie saw the marker pass upwards. Its disappearance above made it seem so final. His heart began a slow but steady rate increase as the lift descended further and further into the depths. Mayane continued to stare down into the shaft; he himself saw little of interest. The strings of light stretched as far down as he could see. But the breeze, if anything, was a little stronger.

“Three and a half kilometers,” Mayane said moving back to the control panel to slow the lift. As if to ease his concern, she added, “The lift will stop automatically when we reach the bottom of the shaft.”

You hope, he thought. But he said nothing aloud. He tried to esti­mate the meters now, regarding them as the more familiar unit of measure called yards. The lift continued to decelerate. The sweet scent grew stronger, as did the breeze. Mayane, back at her post by the door, resumed her vigil.

Allie, belatedly, wondered why she had slowed the lift if it was going to come to a stop at the bottom anyway. After a moment he asked the question.

“There might have been another cave-in or rock collapse,” she explained, without looking up. “That’s why I’m also watching now.”

She had succeeded in giving him one more thing to worry about. He moved in beside her to watch, too.

Gradually a cluster of boulders and chunks of rubble came into view some fifty yards further down. When Allie pointed, Mayane said, “That was there before. It won’t impact the lift.”

Metal screeched and protested as the brakes slowed the lift’s progress. It came to a stop not a foot from the uppermost boulder. Allie drew several shallow breaths and exhaled each one in a burst of air. Mayane raised the door and stepped out onto the boulder.

“Coming?” she said sharply, as if she did not have all day to indulge him.

The lights continued to function, and Allie noticed a string of them leading along the ceiling of the tunnel off to the right of the lift. A brief calculation told him the direction was roughly to the west. He settled the backpack across his shoulders, looped the rope, and gingerly followed her down the pile of detritus to the tunnel, the flashlight in his hand showing the way.

Here the breeze was enough to ruffle Mayane’s hair and waft in against his chest through his shirt sleeves. The lights and the flash­light failed to illuminate clearly what lay ahead, only that the tunnel continued for some distance. Even so, they moved cautiously, uncer­tain of the footing. At several spots they were forced to wind their way around fallen rocks and timbers. Allie glanced up from time to time, wondering whether the tunnel ceiling would hold. He heard the hiss of loose dirt falling, like sand in a giant hourglass. The sound of it echoed in the tunnel, as if the surrounding rock had itself become a ghost.

“Up ahead,” Mayane said pointing to a blackness where the lights had failed. “There’s the blockage. And this is as good a place as any to take your samples.”

“What’s on the other side of that cave-in?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “I’ve never been that far. I’ve never even been this bloody far. Take your bloody samples!”

He passed her and continued on his way, the flashlight marking his progress.

“What the bloody hell are you doing?” she called. Her voice, like the falling dirt, echoed.

“I want to see if there is a way past.”

Mayane heaved an exasperated sigh and her words had a sarcas­tic bite to them. “I thought you came here to take samples,” she said, following him. “You’re not here for that. You lied to me.”

“I didn’t expect anyone to come with me,” he muttered.

She gave him a hard shove. “Damn you.”

Recovering, he began to climb the rocks of the cave-in. It appeared to him, in the light from the flashlight, that there was an opening atop the pile. A very dim light was shining through it from the other side. Here, too, the breeze was powerful enough to blow dust into his eyes. He paused to unzip a pocket in the backpack and removed a pair of goggles. After a brief hesitation, he dug out a spare pair and offered it to Mayane, who snatched it angrily from his hand.

“Would you mind telling me what you did come here for?” she asked, with forced calm.

“The Moho,” he told her.

“The…what?”

With a sigh he stopped just below the top of the pile. Wind blew through his hair. “The Mohorovičić discontinuity. You have heard of it?”

“Don’t be bloody stupid, of course I have. But we’re, I don’t know, ten or fifteen miles above it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Looking up at him, she planted fists on her hips. “And why not?”

Allie sat on a boulder and turned around to face her. The dim light cast his face in shadows. “I read the official report on the cave-in, in an obscure journal called World Geology Today. The remark about the breeze down here intrigued me. Nobody else placed any significance to it but given the floor of the tunnel had collapsed, I had to wonder whether there was a way into the Earth.”

“Jules Verne,” she sneered. “Good fiction, but mostly bad movies.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“That explains the rope,” she said, ice in her tone now. “I should have known something was amiss. I was so focused on getting rid of you…”

“Send the lift back down after you get back up there,” he said. “If you would, please.”

She frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“That depends on what’s on the other side of this cave-in. If the floor collapsed there, it may be worth investigating.”

“For an article in World Geology Today, I suppose,” she said derisively.

He ignored her tone. “That would be nice,” he said. “But first, I’d have to have something to base it on. Thank you for all your help, MejMayane.” He turned and began crawling toward the opening.

The opening gave way to a rugged passageway of shattered rock. The going made Allie wish he had worn sturdier gloves. Ahead, the light was stronger, although it still seemed to come from a distance. Sweat crept under his goggles, and dust sifted into his nostrils. It was the light that drove him forward; had it not been present, he might have abandoned the attempt altogether. But the light simply did not belong there, and it had to come from somewhere.

The “Wait” surprised him, and he paused in mid-crawl to glance back. God only knew why, but Thadie Mayane was coming along, too. She looked too determined to be dissuaded from following him…no, from accompanying him. He flashed the flashlight at her face. Her dark skin glistened with the brighter light. Before she could protest, he turned the light away.

“What the hell is it with you?” he growled. “I thought you’d be pleased to be well rid of me.”

She coughed in the dust. “People saw us come down here,” she said, fighting a dry throat. “If I go back up without you, I’d have paperwork in three bloody copies in each of six different bloody languages to fill out.” She made a little motion with her hand. “Go on, get going. It’s tight enough in here as it is.”

Head shaking, Allie moved on. The rubble gave way to a slope that yielded under his weight, slowing his progress. Twice Mayane shoved the soles of his boots to hurry him on. Twenty yards ahead yawned a light-filled chasm where the floor had collapsed. His world was now filled with things that should not be. His heart began to race, and a blend of anticipation and fear formed a lump in his throat. Down the slope, he encountered blocks of granite that had to be climbed over before he could reach the floor of the tunnel.

By this time, Mayane had caught him up. Slick with sweat, their arms collided as they reached to pull themselves over a flat boulder. “Does it seem cooler in here to you?” he asked.

“Oh, yes indeed, a good degree and a half cooler.”

They shared a laugh and pushed on down the rubble. Soon enough, they were able to stand and walk. Cautiously they approached the opening—step, pause, step, pause. Eddies of air cooled them, and dried their skin, although it did little for their clothing.

“I don’t know that I’d get much closer, Meneer,” she said. “There’s no telling how stable this spur is.”

“I know,” he replied. “But I have to see.”

With his next step, the tunnel floor under them gave way.