This vertical drop had the effect of making the moles gathered far below him seem tiny, like ants, except that they crouched still and in order, a crescent of moles gathered about what, from above, looked like a jagged shadow but which, after a while, he made out to be a single stone on the floor of the chamber.
To one side of them was an entrance. Leaning against the wall of the chamber, ready to seal it, was a great, round flint, shiny and blue and contrasting with the dull, rough texture of the sarsen.
A hush fell. There was a muttering among several of the moles, and two of them went over to the flint and started rocking it back and forth, for it was too heavy for them to heave in one go. Then Bracken saw that they were going to seal the entrance, and the only way that the flint was to be stopped from rolling past it was by a jag of flint set out from the wall, against which it would rest; and Bracken noticed another for the return journey, when whatever they were going to do was finished and they intended to unseal the entrance. Forward, backward, forward, back… the rocking of the stone was taken up as a chant among the other moles as the great crunch, ker-unch of the stone’s movement began to vibrate about the chamber, spiralling rhythmically up the walls around towards where Bracken crouched, with his snout peeping over the edge from the squat, arched entrance from which he watched, and then booming its way upwards into the echoing darkness above. The chant became slower, not faster, as the flint rocked further back and further forward, almost tipping over at last on to the flint set out of the wall, teetering, then back until, with one mighty effort and with a loud push from the moles, the flint rolled right forwards and struck hard against the flint stop in the wall.
It was a moment which all those moles watching, especially ones who had never seen it before, like Bracken, would never forget. For as the flint struck the stop, a spark of stunning light leapt from between the two stones and filled the whole chamber with a light so bright that it seemed everything in the chamber was turned into iridescent white, except the shadows, which turned pitch-black. The outline of each mole on the chamber floor was delineated in frozen clarity, the edges of the sarsen stones and the flints themselves seemed as hard as ice, the arched entrance in which Bracken hid became an arched, black hole against the white surrounding wall, the very heights of the massive chamber itself might have been seen, had a mole been looking at them.
As the first struck together and the light lit up the chamber for an eternal second, several of the moles, all older ones who had sung the song before, broke into a deep-voiced, rhythmic song that seemed cast as far back in time as the very stones of which the chamber was built. It was a song such as Bracken had never heard before, which took a mole’s heart into itself and carried it, and his spirit, and his whole being in powerful steps towards the heart of the Stone itself. Bracken gasped and moved forward, unafraid of being observed so high up, as from its very first notes the song took his spirit into its ancient being.
But as the last of the light from the clashing flints died away and he watched the singing moles below, he did not see one other sight that the spark had lit up and frozen even higher up in the chamber than he was, on the opposite side and crouched in a similar tunnel end. It was the face of Skeat, the Holy Mole, crouched in an entrance high above the chamber where, by long tradition, the Holy Moles who had sung the song themselves listened in silence to its subsequent singing.
But what Skeat saw, no other Holy Mole had ever suffered seeing, and it brought to his peaceful face a look of unutterable alarm. He had seen Bracken and realised in that instant of white light that the song that had been secret for so many centuries was now being heard by a nonscribe. It was for him a moment of terrible blasphemy. It was as if the sacred song itself was being reviled and sworn on; it was a kind of spiritual death. Shaking with horror, Skeat turned away from the chamber and began to make his way down the tunnel levels to where Bracken was crouched.
