CHAPTER XXV

PREPARING FOR ACTION

The next day was a busy one, not only for Lennard himself but for others
whose help he had come to enlist in the working out of the Great
Experiment.

He turned up at Bowcock's house on the stroke of seven, got into his pit
clothes, and was dropped down the twelve-hundred-foot shaft in the cage.
At the bottom of the shaft he found a solid floor sloping slightly
eastward, with three drives running in fan shape from north-east and
south-east. There were two others running north and north-west.

After ten minutes' very leisurely walk round the base of the shaft,
during which he made one or two observations by linear and perpendicular
compass, he said to Tom Bowcock:

"I think this will do exactly. The points are absolutely correct. If we
had dug a hole for ourselves we couldn't have got one better than this.
Yes, I think it will just do. Now, will you be good enough to take me to
the surface as slowly as you can?"

"No, but yo're not meanin' that, Measter Lennard," laughed the manager.
"'Cause if I slowed t' engines down as much as I could you'd be the rest
o' t' day getting to t' top."

"Yes, of course, I didn't mean that," said Lennard, "but just
slowly--about a tenth of the speed that you dropped me into the bowels
of the earth with. You see, I want to have a look at the sides."

"Yo' needna' trouble about that, Mr Lennard, I can give yo' drawin's of
all that in t' office, but still yo' can see for yo'rself by the
drawin's afterwards."

The cage ascended very slowly, and Lennard did see for himself. But when
later on he studied the drawings that Tom Bowcock had made, he found
that there wasn't as much as a stone missing. When he had got into his
everyday clothes again, and had drunk a cup of tea brewed for him by Mrs
Bowcock, he said as he shook hands with her husband:

"Well, as far as the pit is concerned, I have seen all that I want to
see, and Lord Westerham was just as right about the pit as he was about
the man who runs it. Now, I take it over from to-day. You will stop all
mining work at once, close the entrances to the galleries and put down a
bed of concrete ten feet thick, level. Then you will go by the drawings
that I gave you last night.

"At present, the concreting of the walls in as perfect a circle as you
can make them, not less than sixteen feet inner diameter, and building
up the concrete core four feet thick from the floor to the top, is your