On Saturday fortnight, a wizened gnome led a team of craggy dwarves before our gate, itinerate assayers drawn to the craning engines our alchemist erects. Mercenaries, true, but discriminating, their love of gold rivaled only by their enmity for dragons, trolls, and grendel-folk.
Surveying our fortifications, they focus first on the mortar bonds between the fieldstones of the gates, walls and towers, inspecting every joint, ensuring none has crumbled. Eventually, they declare the structures sound, but offer a gem of experience: grendels tend to burrow. Though our foundation appears solid, to their eyes it is full of fractures, veins and subsurface ducting that leave it vulnerable to mining, a perennial of siege. The surface war, while important, will be lost if the grendel undermines our defenses.
This diminutive quartet has a nose for minerals, scenting a thin, quartz fault beneath the overburden, just there within the wall. A trio of test wells are sunk from the sub-basement of each tower. Technetium is poured and traced through every fissure, cleft and crack. We descend the darkness by knotted rope and ladder, delving deep within hidden chambers, spiral stairways, sumps, and crystal caverns, mighty halls to these mountain kings. Finally, we stand at the heart of the stronghold's granite core.
Listening, they each press an ear to a different wall, attuned to the muffled ring of steel striking stone like hammer upon anvil at the distant center of a malignant forge. In silence we watch as they cock their heads first one way, then another, conferring in low tones between, then moving on until the entire castle rock has been assayed. Only after several more whispered moments do they declare the rock is strong, that no mining has begun. But they warn us to prepare the shafts for countermines deep within the fortress, a precaution.
Within the matrix they scatter arcane instruments, invasion drums that amplify the sounds of chisels so even our ears can hear the booming, a multi-headed dragon jar that indicates the direction of subterranean activity by dropping a pebble from one of its many mouths. The venerable gnome warns us not to tarry underground. Trolls lurk in ambush along dead-end tunnels, feeding on ignorance and isolation. Grendels derive power from the silence and the dark. We deny them victory by taking our place among the living, by interacting with life, not dwelling in the cold places beneath the earth.
Ascending a twisted stair, we emerge on the back bailey near the water gate. We read with the cats in the warm spring sun, watching as blue jays splash in a knotwork basin surrounded by blooms of lavender, pink and white, a monument to the familiar friend whose radiance guides us through the darkness, glad for any companions who choose to wander by.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
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One of the constants of cancer treatment is tests. You name it, they run it. CT scans, MRIs, x-rays, MuGAs, bone density scans, biopsies, and blood tests, blood tests, blood tests. Bring a whole new meaning to the words “data mining.” You live and die by the results, literally.
Karen is a geologist. She loves rocks, always has. When we were driving around Wales, I was looking at the castles for their stonework and defensive positions. She was always looking at the outcroppings they sat upon. So we were both happy in different ways. Of course, Wales, like Scotland, is a geologist’s dream. Better land for grazing than farming, because there is tons of exposed rock and stone.
In a siege, the attackers would dig under a castle wall, then usually fill the tunnel with brush and timber and light it on fire to weaken the stone. Literally undermining it. The besieged feared such tunnels as the castle walls were their only protection. They could countermine, which is just digging under the enemy tunnels to collapse them before they could approach or be set alight. But they had to know whether the enemy was digging first, as countermines take a lot of time and energy.
At some point, I ran across a few medieval mechanisms that castle defenders used to detect tunneling. The simplest was essentially a large or cistern or bowl filled with water so they could see the ripples the tunneling caused. The Chinese were more inventive. They invented a drum that amplified the sounds of digging so you could hear actually hear it. They would scatter those throughout a castle under siege. They also came up with something like a large brass ring that had eight dragon’s heads spaced evenly around it. Each dragon lightly held a ball in its mouth. The device was calibrated so that when it detected vibrations from tunneling the dragon’s mouth in direction of the digging would drop its ball, pointing to the mine. Very clever engineering.
Picture notes: This is Bryn Celli Ddu (which means Mound of the Dark Grove), a cairn (Neolithic burial chamber) on the island of Anglesey in Wales. Looking through our pictures, it reminded both of us of an old mine entrance, so we went with it.
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