Felix and Willoughby go prospecting

November, 1930

They go on through the canyons and emerge back onto the sloping scrubby desert.  The canyon was by way of detour.  They wrap up again.  Half a mile and they are at another sinkhole, this one twice as large as the first.  There is evidence that Willoughby has been at work here, the dirt is disturbed and heaped up, and Picobel’s tracks.

There is no one in sight in any direction.

They dismount at the edge of the sinkhole and Willoughby tugs out a compass from Picobel’s saddlebag and together they walk out into the depression.  “Watch this,” he says, and the compass begins to waver, dip, swerve.

“The hell,” Felix says.

Willoughby grins, “Pipe collapse for sure.”

This leaves him not much the wiser.

But Willoughby is walking out farther on the surface of the thing.  “Magnetically strange, these things are.  This is the big one, but there’s five more you can practically see from here.  All that way.”  He lifts his chin to the south.  “A pipe you get when you get an old, old irregularity in the formation of the stone to begin with.  Way down in the Mississippian Redwall you get a fault, who knows how far down it goes from there.  The fault persists, you get mineral fluid pressing up, you get the limestone formed over it, the sandstone, but still there’s this spot where the stone doesn’t form.  Characteristic of the Morrison Formation, in fact.  It’s called stoping.  It’s not quite a fumerole but it’s related.  Way down deep enough you’d get some magma.”  He stops, pockets the compass, and kneels to a broad flat stone.  “Anyway you get this tube,” he says, and slides the stone aside.

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There is a hole underneath.

“I think it goes down a ways,” he says.

Felix steps forward.  There is a smell, not sulfurous but briney, an ancient sea cooking in the deeps.  The entrance to Pellucidar.  “You haven’t been in?”

Willoughby grins.  “I guess I wanted somebody along in case of something.”  Willoughby has brought two ridged steel-barreled Eveready flashlights.  He kneels at the edge of the hole and with Felix looking on he dips his head into the darkness.  Felix takes his turn.  He sees a little passageway that crumbling leads downward.  A bear’s den, almost.  “Well,” Willoughby asks, “you game?”

“I’m game.”

Willoughby stands and goes to his saddlebags again and pulls out some rope and a climbing piton and a hammer.  He buries the piton deep in the rock a few feet from the hole and leads the rope through and tugs on the rope.

“Pull,” Willoughby says.

He does.  The piton is buried to its neck and does not move.

“You first, Mr. DuPrie.”

He hands the rope back.  “Big chance.”

Willoughby grins again and sheds his scarf and coat and hat and stuffs the flashlight in his belt.  Then he takes up the rope in two gloved hands.  He seats himself at the entrance, then angles his boots in and with a twisting slithering motion he lowers himself into the hole and disappears.  Felix goes to the edge.  After a minute Willoughby’s voice comes up.  “It clears out a little,” he says.  His voice in a chute.  Then: “Sure, it gets better.  It’s sort of stairsteps partway.”

He strips down and taking a last look at the horses Felix tugs on the rope and backs down into the hole himself.  The smell is distinct, seaside.  The footing is angled and cracked but he can wedge his toes in or plant the side of his boot on a little lip.  It is dark soon as the passage screws away from the entrance, though some light reaches from above.  There is room to maneuver but he is slow and leery of the rope and wraps it around his forearm.  Far below he can hear Willoughby scrambling down.  The rope jerks between his thighs.  What to do with the flashlight is another question.  He has it in one hand waving around then in his armpit but this is still awkward.  It lights the craggy piebald breccia of the wall, black and white. There is a shout from below.  “You all right?” he calls down.

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The voice is echoed: “Run out of rope.”

Slowly, slowly, he makes his way down.  He sees Willoughby’s light below and finally comes down just above it.  “Seems like it’s a pipe, all right, ” Felix says.

“Biggest one I’ve ever seen.”  Willoughby’s voice is hushed and thoughtful.

They sit perched there fifty feet or so below the surface.  The air is perfectly still.  The rope whispers on the rock.

Then there is a click and Willoughby’s light is gone.  “Turn out your light,” comes his voice.

“Like hell I will.”

“Turn it out.”

Felix props himself against the rock and secures the rope around his arm and pulls the flashlight from his armpit and slides the button up.  In the sudden darkness he can hear the pebbly fall beneath his boots and Willoughby’s labored breathing from below.  Those Sinagua stickmen dancing.  Something in the air.  Crannies and crevices.  His eyes are adjusting.  There are shapes here, he sees.  A faint texture, a suggestion of the wall.  He looks down.  The walls are glowing yellow beneath him.  All the way down.  Down forever, a yellow glow leading to the center of the earth.

“Well hello beautiful,” Willoughby says.

He reaches out and scrapes.  A glowing powder feathers off and drifts downward.

“Ain’t she pretty, Mr. DuPrie.”

“What is it?”

“Why, that’s carnotite, Mr. DuPrie.  Biggest deposit you’re ever likely to see in one place.”  The man’s voice is full of satisfaction.  “That’s what you find in your breccia pipes.  Owned outright by the fine men at Dundee Timber, if only they knew about it.”

“What’s it good for?”

“It’s uranium ore,” says Willoughby, and turns on his light.  “It makes people rich.”