He was tempted to go beyond the stones in the cave through the gap between them, but one thing he had learned in exploration of a new place was that it was best to approach by the least obvious way. It was not that he was afraid for himself here so much as that he felt himself on the edge of some religious rite for the Stone and preferred to be as unobserved as possible. For this reason he retreated out of the stone caves and climbed up on top of the long barrow where, rather to his surprise, he found evidence of molehills, though they were old and half washed away by weather.
It was now growing dark and the wind had died a little so that the trees swayed only very slightly, whispering occasionally around the barrow and giving the impression of a growing calm. He snouted from one molehill to the next until he found one where the scent had completely gone and what remained of it was just wet and muddy. Experience now told him that such an entry was likely to be unobserved and forgotten, and he was right. The entrance was virtually blocked up with age and he had to burrow some way down, taking care to let no soil fall downwards, before he found the tunnel he was looking for.
The soil was darker than the chalky soil he had got used to in Uffington, and the tunnel itself was smaller. It led along a short way and then down almost vertically, and then on again and down once more, as if he was dropping into a deeper and deeper silence. There was molescent about, but it was distant and still. It was as if he had descended vertically into a sleeping burrow, except that there was no burrow as such and, as far as he could see, there were no moles near.
The tunnel came to a sudden end, sealed irreversibly by a massive sarsen stone. He put a paw to it and then his snout, sensing that beyond it lay something which would be well worth seeing. Bracken very much wanted to get beyond it and was tempted to burrow round it until, feeling the hard, caked soil in which it was embedded, he realised that the attempt would make far too much noise. Yet, at the same time, he felt an urgent need to press on, a confusing mixture of awe and disregard for the place coming over him, with the same feeling of certainty that he would get through which he had had in the Chamber of Roots with Rebecca when they had passed on to the buried Stone itself. He retreated, looking for the slightest burrowable chink in the wall.
Soon he found one, at the bottom corner of another sarsen stone that lined the wall and in which the soil was not packed so tightly. Careful not to scratch the stone with his talons and so make a noise, he rapidly burrowed the chink bigger so that his snout was into the hole behind his paws, and then his shoulders, and he was pushing the dry soil behind him in great scoops, until the earth ahead collapsed forward and he was in a burrow or small chamber. There was an entrance on its far side and through it he could hear, from somewhere far off, even further off than the scent, the faintest vibrations of voices, as if many moles were gathered together and whispering in a chamber that echoed their sound. He went through this chamber into a tunnel off which there were many turns to left and right. The walls were partly composed of dark earth and partly of dark-olive sarsen stones, which gave any sound in the tunnel a heavy thunking echo in which even the lightest cough might sound serious.
Bracken headed downwards as fast as he could without making a noise, the mutterings and coughing sounds seeming to come from several directions at once and giving him the feeling that he was on the edge of something important which he could not quite reach. He sneaked his way along, keeping to the inside edge of the wall where it curved, just in case there were moles ahead. The sound of voices grew louder and richer and he very nearly stopped, convinced that at the next corner he would come to a great mass of moles. But each turn in the tunnel brought nothing but a louder and louder sound of the moles voices echoing around and past him.
Ahead, the air gained a spacious quality that warned him long before he reached it that he was about to approach a gap in the tunnel or a precipitous void, and he snouted ahead very carefully until, quite suddenly, the floor ahead disappeared and he found himself crouching at the end of a huge drop into the biggest, deepest chamber he had ever seen. It was not so wide as the Chamber of Dark Sound, but it was certainly deeper, and it was some moments before he could make out anything in it, though the echoing and coughing and throat-clearing that came up from below made it obvious that the moles he had heard were gathered somewhere in the gloom below.
The chamber was round and for the most part seemed to have been made of the sarsen stones, piled one on top of the other to form a well-like wall that dropped way down below him and rose far above him into dark and echoing heights he could not even see.
