returned home from the other end of the universe. I felt dizzy and very tired. All this had taken less than five minutes. I turned and walked back to my tent, and tried to look inside myself again. For a moment, I succeeded.
This time, I felt nothing.
But when I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I found that I no longer wanted to sleep. I would have preferred to talk to Reich, or to anyone. I had to express what I had suddenly realized. Man assumes that his inner world is private. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place’ said Marvell, and we have the same feeling about the mind. In the real world, our freedom is limited; in imagination, we can do anything we like; what is more, we can defy the world to penetrate the secret; the mind is the most private place in the universe—sometimes, perhaps, too private. ‘We each think of the key, each in his prison’. And the whole difficulty of treating madmen is to break into that prison.
Yet I could not forget that feeling of something alien inside my mind. Now I thought back on it, it did not seem so terrifying. After all, if you walk into your own room, expecting it to be empty, and you find someone there, your first response is fear: it could be a burglar. But this soon passes. Even if it is a burglar, you confront him as a reality, and that original flash of fear passes away. What was so alarming was that feeling of something—or someone—inside my own head, so to speak.
As my mind lost its fear, and became simply interested in the problem, I felt sleepy. One of my last thoughts before I fell asleep was to wonder if this was some kind of hallucination due to the Turkish coffee and the cigar.
When I woke at seven the next morning, I knew it wasn’t. The memory of that sensation was curiously clear. And yet, let me confess, it now aroused a kind of excitement in me rather than terror. This should be easy enough to understand. The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from ‘sinking into ourselves’. As a romantic, I have always resented this; I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.
At breakfast, I was tempted to talk to Reich about it all. Something withheld me—the fear, I suppose, that he would simply fail to understand. He remarked that I seemed abstracted, and I said that I’d made the mistake of smoking Darga’s cigar—and that was all.
That morning, I supervised the moving of the electronic probe to a place further down the mound. Reich went back to his tent to try to devise some easier method for moving the thing—a cushion of air underneath, for example, on the hovercraft principle. The workmen shifted the probe to a position halfway down the mound, below the lower gate. Then, when it was ready, I took my seat, adjusted the controls on the screen, and pulled the starter.
Almost instantly, I knew I had struck something. The white line that ran from the top to the bottom of the screen showed a distinct bulge halfway down. When I cut the power, increasing the feedback, this immediately spread into parallel horizontal lines. I sent the foreman to fetch Reich, and proceeded to move the control cautiously, probing around the regular object in all directions. The screen showed that there were more of these objects to the left and right of it.
This, of course, was my first experience of discovering anything with the probe, so I had no idea of the size of the object I had found, or of its depth below the ground. But when Reich came running over a moment later, he took one look at the dial, another at the controls, and said: ‘Oh Christ, the bloody thing’s gone wrong.’
‘In what way?’
‘You must have twisted the control too far, and disconnected something. According to this, the object you’ve located is two miles below the ground and seventy feet high!’
I climbed off the seat rather ruefully. It is true that I have no ability to deal with mechanical appliances. New cars break down within hours when I drive them; machines that have never given the slightest trouble blow a fuse as soon as I approach. In this case, I had no consciousness of having done anything wrong, but I felt guilty all the same.
Reich unscrewed a plate and looked inside. He said there was nothing obviously wrong, and that he would have to test all the circuits after lunch. When I apologized, he slapped me on the shoulder.
‘Never mind. We’ve found something anyway. Now all we’ve got to discover is how deep it lies.’
We ate a good cold lunch. Then Reich rushed off to his machine. I took an air mattress, and went and lay down in the shadow of the lion gate, to make up for lost sleep. And I slept deeply and peacefully for two hours.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Reich standing beside me, staring out across the river. I looked at my watch, and sat up hastily.
‘Why on earth didn’t you wake me?’
He sat down on the ground beside me. His manner struck me as subdued.
‘What is it? Can’t you trace the fault?’
He looked at me thoughtfully.
‘There is no fault.’
I failed to understand.
‘You mean it’s repaired?’
‘No. There never was any fault.’
‘Well, that’s cheering. What went wrong then?’
‘That’s what bothers me. Nothing went wrong.’
‘No? In that case, you know how deep this thing is?’
‘Yes. It’s as deep as the gauge showed. Two miles.’
I restrained my excitement; stranger things had happened.
‘Two miles,’ I said. ‘But that’s quite a distance below the foundations of this hill. I mean… that kind of depth ought to take us down to archaeozoic rocks.’
‘That depends. But I’m inclined to agree with you.’
‘Besides, if it’s accurate about the depth, it’s presumably accurate about the size of the blocks—seventy feet high. That sounds a trifle unlikely. Even the building blocks of the great pyramid aren’t that size.’
Reich said good-humouredly: ‘My dear Austin, I agree with you completely. The thing is impossible. But I have checked every circuit in the machine. I don’t see how I could be mistaken.’
‘There’s only one way to find out—send a mole down.’
‘Which is what I was about to suggest. However, if it’s really two miles down, the mole is of no use.’
‘Why?’
‘To begin with, because it was never intended to cut through rock—only through earth or clay. It’s bound to en-counter rock at that depth. Second, because even if there’s no rock at that depth, the pressure of the earth would destroy the mole—it would be like being two miles under the sea. The pressure would be thousands of pounds to the square inch. And since the temperature rises by a hundred degrees to a mile, it could also be too hot for its electrical equipment.
The sheer size of the problem now struck me. If Reich was correct, we could never hope to unearth the ‘objects’ down there—objects that were obviously part of a wall of a city, or of a temple. With all our modern engineering
