The Sleeping Army Awakes

Part 32 Lighting

As they made their way into the mine suddenly Katka started laughing and pointing at something on the wall.

"Sam Well!" Katka teased, "Look over there banana brain. I'm sure that that is light switch over there, we had switches like that at our camp. Do you think that lights still work?"

"Well you can try if you like," Samuel answered,"but it's a bit unlikely seeing as this place has been abandoned for so long!"

Katka threw the handle of the large rotary switch and the long tunnel was suddenly bathed in light. The deep dark passage seemed much less intimidating now that it was well lit. There was no perceptible noise of any generator having cut in and no flicker from any of the lights although they lit in a cascade two at a time from the entrance into the mine.

"So you don't know everything after all!" Katka said triumphantly.

"I have never claimed that I know everything!" Samuel said. "sometimes a man's greatest strength is to know what he doesn't know. And now I know that I didn't know something, I have learned a lesson. So that makes me a stronger person."

"And you've been fumbling around in the dark with your silly hat with your headlight and whatever else you were carrying when all that you needed to do was turn on lights." Katka laughed hoarsely. "Men! To think that I had to suffer being in dark with strange hairy old man with light on his head telling me ghost stories!"

"Come on Katka. I just didn't see the light switch!" Samuel laughed, taking no notice at all of Katka's tone of voice. "It was pitch black when I arrived. I could only see something when the lightning struck."

"Ah but then you found your silly light hat thing!" Katka observed correctly and despite her frustration began to laugh. "You could have found light switch then but you didn't even look did you?"

"I had found some food and the highest priority was to eat it before I starved and then the wolves came." Samuel explained even though he knew that this was hardly likely to satisfy Katka.

"So like typical man you preferred stumbling in dark to turning on light!" Katka teased.

"Well thanks to you Katka we have plenty of light now!" Samuel said brightly, hoping that that would be an end to the subject but knowing women as he did, suspecting that it would be quite some time before the subject was dropped completely. "Let's celebrate the power of female intuition!"

"Shall we get moving?" was Katka's only teasing reply.

They moved on into the mine, more conscious of the twisting treacherous tangle of intersecting tracks that they could have tripped on the last time. There were two main tracks heading inward. They had been lucky because they had negotiated them totally oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

"I can see everything now." Katka teased, still chuckling to herself about her cleverness, "Funny how much you can see now that lights are on. Big isn't it?"

Samuel had to admit that he could see far more detail than he had done using just the head lamp. Samuel was still wearing the hard hat but only because he was aware that is left arm and hand wasn't as nimble as it had been before the lightning strike and it would have been embarrassing to fumble so much to remove them. When they came level to the graffiti he pointed at it and asked Katka if she knew what the numbers signified.

Katka had no idea what the long numbers were. She had only done basic arithmetic and it wasn't obvious to her what the numbers signified, but she gathered the point of the rest of the message and was less than impressed with the sentiments.

"I take it all the miners were men!" Katka remarked, but then she reflected that she had friends that were a bit like Sacha. Katka's friends had told her that doing this sort of thing willingly, made life easier with the guards. Sometimes the guards paid for their services and sometimes the girls just disappeared completely never to be seen again or came to work with black eyes the next day. She wondered how many of these clever girls were still alive.

"This Sacha, whoever she was," Katka remarked, "she sounds as though she was interesting person!"

"I'm sure that she was a nice girl!" Samuel commented. "We are all nice until life makes us otherwise. I was nice once."

"I think that you're nice now!" Katka said. "But I've known girls and they were not good girls!"

"But anyway you are assuming that the references to Sacha are true!" Samuel defended. "I know men who would write malicious statements about each other's girls on the toilet walls."

"There is no smoke without fire!" Katka said uncharitably, thinking about her former friends.

"I always find it better to think well of everyone until proven guilty." Samuel observed.

Samuel was surprised to find out how much more detail he saw now on the walls, ceiling and floor compared to his first viewing with the headlamp. He could see everything with far more clarity in the steady light than he had done using the head lamp. There was a definite strata mark where the tunnel had been deepened  and below this there were numerous references to the Sleeping Army and Sacha seemed to be a very popular girl judging from the different writing styles and languages but there could have been more than one Sacha being referred to.

Now that everything was illuminated, it was also really clear that the tunnel had originally possessed a lower ceiling and that for some reason, the floor had been lowered considerably and that the tunnel had been widened a lot too.

"Do you know Katka?" Samuel said. "This tunnel is so large that you could probably get one of those Sikorsky helicopters down here without removing the rotors." Then he stroked his beard. "Of course you couldn't actually fly the thing in here!"

"Fascinating!" Katka said in a bored voice. "Come on I can't wait to find some clean clothes!"

They came to the long passage with the store chambers. Katka found another switch and turned it on. The lights blazed into life. She said nothing but smiled ironically and did a little curtsey. Once again the lamps had lit without any hint that they hadn't been used for years.

The passage was different to the main tunnel. It was narrower for one thing and the walls, though doubtlessly blasted from the rock originally, were lined in large blocks and mortar and the result had been painted battleship grey. The large entrance pressure door, was housed in a wall built from the same large grey blocks, laid like oversized bricks and mortared in between. The outline of each brick was clearly visible despite several layers of paint. There was no graffiti here at all.

"Whoever occupied the mine obviously thought that they were in it for the long haul because they certainly went to a lot of trouble to construct all of this." Samuel said. "Look here's a door that I haven't tried yet."

He turned the large handle on the door releasing the seal. This time there was a definite rush of air indicating that the door had not been opened for a really long time. Katka wanted to rush straight in but feeling that something was wrong Samuel put his arm out to stop her.

"We'd better come back to this room after the air has had time to readjust!" Samuel said wisely. "We have no way of knowing, other than passing out, whether the atmosphere is breathable. The navy used to use different gasses to keep dry goods for long periods of time. It could be anything from nitrogen to carbon dioxide in there or perhaps a mixture of both either of which could suffocate us. Here help me to open the door a little."

Katka helped him to do so, but was eager to look inside. "I'll take a deep breath and see if I can find the light switch so that we can at least see what's inside!" she announced.

It seemed like a workable plan to Samuel. So Katka went inside and switched the light on and then returned outside to view the contents.

"It just looks like another corridor to me!" She said.

"Let's move on then." Sam said, "We're missing the sunshine outside."

They left the door ajar and went on to the next door.