It was simple and uncarved and not as big as other ancient tunnels, and it ran only a short way before it cut into a tunnel that curved away to the right and left.
He travelled carefully round this tunnel, which was roughly circular, as rapidly as he could, disturbing the chalk dust that had settled there through the ages and which flurried behind him in his haste. Its walls were of hard chalk subsoil, roughly burrowed, and it was clearly no more than a passageway. It took a long time to complete the full circuit, but when he had, he had a very much clearer idea of what he must do.
In addition to the entrance he had joined it by, the circular tunnel had a total of eight different entrances leading off it. Of these, seven were flint-lined and led on towards the centre of the circle. From each came a curious murmuring, confusing rather than fearful, and not unlike the distant chatter of male moles—sometimes one sound rose a little above the rest, at others there was a momentary lull.
The eighth entrance was simply a tunnel leading away from the circle on the far side where he had first entered. Here and there on the outer edge of the circle there was a root, half buried, sliding down the wall from above, which suggested that his location was in that treeless circle that surrounded the outer edge of the Stone clearing, adjacent to the trees that formed it, which meant that he still had the roots of the massive beeches that formed the clearing itself to pass through.
It took him three hours or so to make the full circuit, and since, at this depth, there was no food supply at all and he was hungry and tired, he returned to the Chamber of Dark Sound and cut across it to the eastern entrance, along which he knew he would have no trouble finding food.
He returned after a good sleep, carefully bringing with him some worms, which he stored in a cache in the circular tunnel; and then he went into the nearest of the flint-lined entrances towards the murmur of sound, anxious to get on with what he hoped was the final exploration into the heart of the Ancient System.
The tunnel was small and crudely burrowed into the subsoil, with a packed floor, rough walls and a simple rounding for the roof. After a short way, it split into two and, taking the right-hand fork, Bracken found that it almost immediately split into two again. Worse, the tunnel began to curve confusingly and then cut across other tunnels, and split yet more times. To add to this spatial confusion, the deeper he got, the louder the stressed murmuring he had first heard so ominously in the Chamber of Dark Sound became, while the echoes of his pawsteps kept coming back to him, running in from all directions, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to confuse him, disappearing off behind him. Until he stopped, lost, and with no idea of whether he was going forward or backward, away from the centre of the system or towards it.
It took him two long hours to find his way back again, and then only with the greatest skill and patience as he marked each turn and thought carefully back to the twists and turns he could remember.
It was while he was in the worrying process of doing this, crouching and thinking what to do next and making no noise himself, that he began to suspect what the vague murmurings he had first heard were, or might be. They were muffled and soft, but there was enough edge and harshness to the louder of them for him to think that they must be the sound of the roots of the beech trees that protected the buried part of the Stone. He was getting closer.
When he finally got back to the safety of the circular tunnel and had eaten, he was sufficiently stirred by the realisation of how near he was to want to go back quickly and try again.
What followed took him not minutes or hours but five days, and is now regarded as one of the greatest feats of tunnel analysis by any single mole. For the tunnel of echoes into which Bracken had entered, and in which he might easily have been lost and never heard of again, had been deliberately designed by the ancient moles to protect the Stone from just such interlopers as Bracken. Once, it had been protected by living moles as well, and he certainly would not have got as far as even the Chamber of Dark Sound. But the original designers of the system had foreseen that some catastrophe might one day overtake it, as it clearly had, and so had provided the Stone with the extra protection of the tunnels whose challenge Bracken now faced.
