On the third day of his new exploration, Bracken travelled a little way down one of the tunnels that branched off towards the centre of the Ancient System, which was the part he most wanted to reach. The tunnel was smaller than the communal one from which it led out, just as elegantly burrowed, and flints still lined its walls.
He was only a few moleyards into it when he saw ahead of him the well-rounded entrance into a burrow. He approached with heart beating rapidly and breath held, for in any system it is the burrows that bring home the fact that moles actually once lived and ate, slept and fought there. He entered it a little nervously, automatically sniffing at the entrance for the scent of life, though he knew that there could be none there. The burrow was bigger than those in the present system, and oval instead of round. Its soil was the same grey-white of the tunnels, the walls were smooth and held no flints, and on its floor lay the dusty fibres of some long-since-perished nesting material. The whole effect was sparse and cold, and try as he might, he could not imagine moles living there in some past time; he felt the age of the burrow, but no warm sense of its past life.
It was the same further on—the same oval burrow, the same sparseness, the same disappointing inability to reach back to the moles who must once have lived there. Quite what Bracken expected he didn’t know, but ever since he had first heard of the Ancient System the idea of its past life had excited his imagination. Now he was here—well, he wanted more than he could have.
He explored down all the subsidiary tunnels leading towards the centre of the wood, which were within reach of the base he had established for himself in his original tunnel. He gradually got used to the rich sound and by association and deduction was able to start to interpret it. At the same time, and without knowing it, he built up his strength again so that when he was ready for more ambitious exploration, he was fit enough for it as well.
It was the second week of August when he made the decision to press forwards to where he reckoned the centre of the system would be, and not try and return in one day but to make do with whatever burrow he could find. By now, the great communal tunnel that had so impressed him at the start was familiar, its curves and twists still mysterious and beautiful, but the initial awe he had felt was replaced by a certain proprietorial confidence. He felt there was nothing more it could tell him and that having conquered it, so to speak, he might as well move on to better things.
With this dangerously complacent attitude, Bracken left what was in fact no more than the periphery of the Ancient System and struck westwards towards its very centre. He took the biggest of the subsidiary tunnels and, ignoring all side turns and burrow entrances, pressed on down it, anxious to see if he could find something like a centre to the system.
Bracken’s sense of direction was, as ever, very accurate, for the tunnel went directly west towards where he was certain the Stone itself stood.
However, he was over-optimistic about the speed he would make, for after two or three hundred moleyards, the tunnel’s condition deteriorated rapidly as it sloped upwards nearer the surface and entered an area of softer, blacker soil. There were frequent roof-falls to burrow through; they had cascaded down in the long-distant past and opened the way for superficial vegetation to send down its roots, winding and confused, into what had once been a perfect tunnel. At the same time, the roots of trees impinged on the tunnel, sometimes sending a root shaft vertically through it, so that he had to squeeze his way past, while more than once, an old root ran along the tunnel itself, melding into the soil around it and losing the tunnel in a debris of mould that he did not much like burrowing through.
So his progress became slow, and his early hopes of a quick passage to the marvels that he hoped lay ahead were lost in the sweat and toil of pressing forward. The tunnel was not so deep in the ground as the big communal one from which he had started, and had a more temporary air about it, and somehow, somewhere, lost the awesome sense of the past he had felt initially.
This feeling was accentuated by the fact that the marvellous richness of sound in the earlier tunnel was muffled and lost in the confusion of roof-fall and roots he was battling through. He began to feel isolated and cut off in a way he had not felt before, and to have a sense that he was lost for ever in the ruins of a system that was now empty of life and interest.
