From beyond it an ancient sound came, the sound that had been heard for whole ages and eras before even moles roamed the earth; the sound that accompanies the rise and fall, and rise again, of trees and woods and whole forests of trees. The sound of an ancient tree whose huge trunk carries the vibrations of both life and death. The sound of a tree whose roots are alive on the outside and carry life up into the new wood and branches but whose central core is now dry and sacrificed and whose hollow secret darkness stretching high out above the surface may be the home of bats or insects, butterflies or birds, but which below ground, where Bracken and Rebecca were, only carries the sound of a sleeping life that waits to be reborn in the wood’s decay.
They had arrived at the roots of the tree that encircled the Stone in the centre of the clearing. The tunnel now was burrowed out between living and dead roots—the dead roots’ stillness being the peace against which the life of the living roots was set. The roots plunged down into the ancient tunnel, forcing Bracken and Rebecca to squeeze round or between them, on and on, now more slowly and with a deepening sense of being at one with each other and the system that radiated all about them.
The further they advanced along the tunnel, the more its walls seemed to be made up of roots as well as chalk, so that they had the feeling that the tree was all around them, the final guardian of the Stone.
The tunnel grew smaller about them, the dryness of its walls now catching their fur as they advanced and its sound deepened and hollowed ahead of them so that Bracken slowed still more, recognising from its pattern that ahead of them lay a chamber greater than any he had discovered in the Ancient System so far.
There was a mass of debris and dust ahead that blocked the lower half of the tunnel and over whose top Bracken could not see. Cautiously he pushed it forward with his right paw, trying to flatten it down a bit, but it just fell forward and away, the debris sliding away from him in an avalanche, dust rising, and then a long, long silence before, far below them, it cascaded and echoed down on to some unknown, unvisited floor. As the dust cleared, they saw ahead of them the vast round of the old tree’s central hollow, which rose above them to unknown heights of ancient wood, and below to where the debris had fallen. The tunnel gave way to a precipitous path torn out of the side of the hollow and round which they started now to go, the wall of soft wood on their right flank, a void of darkness on their left. It spiralled round and down, and they followed it slowly, feeling as if they were travelling into a past that held in its waiting silence the future as well.
Then Bracken stopped and, half turning back to Rebecca—the narrow path would allow him no more movement than that—he pointed a talon at a sight ahead of them that made her gasp with wonder.
It was a massive jutting, jagged corner of stone, the Stone, around which the tree had girt itself and whose roots had pushed and pulled at it so that in their embrace the great Stone had tilted up and forward towards the west, towards Uffington, until here, deep below ground, the corner of the base on which it had originally stood had risen off the ground and ridden into the hollow depth of the tree itself.
The path traversed right down to the Stone, and then under it, leaving the wall of the hollow as it followed the massive, and now dead, root that had first, as a tendril thinner than a single hair of fur, crept under the Stone so long ago.
Into this holy secret place Bracken and Rebecca now moved, the base of the Stone now actually above them and plunging down ahead of them to the very centre of the Stone and the Ancient System itself.
Then the path widened on to a floor, if floor it was that was half chalk, half soil, half debris, all crossed and intertwined with the arms and bent haunches of long-dead roots. The Stone’s base was above them still, but as they advanced further, clambering over the ancient obstructions in their way, they saw that it plunged suddenly down some distance ahead to form a kind of hollow or cave beyond which, no doubt, the furthest part of the Stone had buried itself finally into the chalk, mirroring in its depth the heights of the other part of the base which tilted above them.
They could only see the top half of this hollow because the roots were bigger than they were and they had to climb over each one. The nearer they got, the more they could see that one last great root had grown across most of the hollow, sealing it off at the bottom and leaving only a thin gap at the top. As they got nearer they both stopped at once.
‘Listen!’ whispered Bracken.
‘Look!’ whispered Rebecca.
