The tunnels leading to the Holy Burrows were worn smooth with age and venerable use. Generations upon generations of scribemoles had trodden their way through them so that some of the protruding flints were rounded and shiny from the rubbing of flank fur, while the chalky floor was packed hard and shiny in places as well, so that near some of the entrances the light coming in made the tunnel floor look like dimly lit ice.
‘We’re nearly there now,’ said Boswell, ‘though there aren’t many moles about.’
‘I haven’t seen any. Not a single one. But I can scent them all right. Uffington must have been affected by the plague like every other system,’ said Bracken brutally. ‘Better face the fact, Boswell.’
‘Well, well,’ said Boswell, ‘we’ll soon know.’
Boswell led them on down a tunnel whose size was equal to the biggest in the Ancient System but whose sculpting was more aged—very like the simple rounds and squares of the tunnel beyond the Chamber of Roots which led to the buried part of the Stone. It sloped steadily downhill for a while before levelling off, and Bracken sensed that they had entered a deeper and somehow more sacred part of the system. It was a place to move slowly in, and with grace, and one where, if a mole spoke at all, he did so in a low voice that did not disturb the peace.
‘We are very near the libraries,’ said Boswell softly. ‘This is a holy place, Bracken, and it is best that you do not say anything to anymole we may meet. I do not think a mole who is not a scribemole has ever been here before, but nor do I remember anything in the writings or rules that is against it. But stay silent, move gently, and let me talk.’
The tunnel entered a round chamber that was the confluence of three other major tunnels as well as two much smaller ones.
‘That one leads to the Holy Burrows themselves,’ said Boswell, pointing to one that Bracken estimated ran westwards, ‘while this one leads to the libraries.’ He led the way down it slowly. As Bracken followed him out of the chamber and into the tunnel, he could have sworn he saw a mole watching them from where, seconds before, there had been nomole, in the entrance to the tunnel to the Holy Burrows. He thought he saw him clearly, an old mole with a long lean face and thin fur, but when he really looked, he wasn’t there! Strange! Bracken looked around him, feeling that in this place time did not mean quite what it meant in other systems. But he had seen a mole! He hastened after Boswell, anxious to keep him in sight.
The tunnel steepened suddenly, going down deeper and deeper, until it was cast into semisolid chalk in which fissures and stratum lines were visible. The air was heavy with the slow echoes of their movement but there was no windsound now at all. The tunnel levelled off again, ran to an entrance, and then they were through it and into an enormous chamber whose end was too far off to see. It was too complex and confusing a place to take in all at once, and it was some moments before Bracken could even make out its main features.
It was not a simple oval or square but rather appeared to be a series of interconnected chambers with entrances between them big enough to allow a mole to see a lot of the next chamber. There were arches and corners in the chambers, parts darker than others, and set into each of the many walls were surfaces on which were stacked what looked like pieces of bark and sometimes flakes of hard chalk. Above these surfaces were embossments like those in the Chamber of Dark Sound. There were stacks of bark on the floor as well, or piled against walls and, as far as Bracken was able to see into the linked chambers, there were more pieces of bark piled untidily there.
‘Books,’ whispered Boswell. ‘This is the main library.’
He was about to say more, and might have taken one of them down to show Bracken, when he was stopped short by a stirring at the far end of the chamber and a movement as what seemed a shadow changed into what looked like an ancient and grey-furred mole who was in the middle of a long yawn.
‘Well! I don’t know, I’m sure,’ the ancient mole muttered to himself, oblivious of their presence at the other end of the chamber. ‘I don’t know. If I didn’t put it where I should have, which is more than likely, then surely I would have put it here, which it seems I didn’t. How they expect me to do all this by myself I really don’t know. Come on, my beauty, where are you?’ he said, snouting back and forth among some of the books and evidently hoping that one of them, which he had obviously lost, would pop out of its own accord and announce its hiding place.
