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then of Stephen. But what difference could this make to Stephen? She was depriving him of nothing, taking from him nothing he wanted or could possess.
    A flock of sheep were in Goughdale, cropping the turf, dark-wooled, long-horned sheep of the breed called Big Allen Black. The outward signs of the disused mine workings beneath, the old windlass, the boundary stones, the ruined coes, rose out of the plain and showed black against the setting sun.
    Would he, seventeen years afterwards, be able to rediscover the mouth of the hole that led down into theGoughdale Mine? He thought he could remember roughly where it was: on the side of Big Allen facing him, the northern face, almost at the foot and a little to the right of centre. Somewhere among the crags of limestone that made a broad shelf along part of the foin’s lowest slopes.
    The hole was referred to by Tace as ‘Apsley Sough’, though ‘sough’, in these parts meant a drain or channel. He had sited it far from where it really was, half a mile down from where it was; he had obviously never seen it. And it couldn’t have been a sough or drain, for there could have been no reason to drain water
into
a mine. Joseph Usher, Tace’s hero, had hidden himself in a chamber of the mine but had been driven out by hunger and thirst and, having given himself up, been taken away to trial and execution. Stephen made his way across the dale towards the mountain by a path that ran to the west of the ruined engine house. It was growing cool, even cold, with the departure of the sun. The sheep lifted their heads and looked at him as he passed by but they made no sound.
    The weather had been hot that August when he was twelve. Peter Naulls and he, searching for the hole into the mine, had got as suntanned as if they had been on the kind of holiday they never had, on the beaches of Spain or Italy. Peter had, literally, stumbled on the mouth of the hole. Running in some ritual or phase of a game — for they didn’t spend every minute of each day crawling and peering and prodding the ground — he had caught his foot in a root and fallen headlong. He had found himself looking into the infinitely complex growth of stem and grass and leaf and tendril and fine twig that covered the moor in a thick springy upholstery, but also beyond this, through and beside this, into clear darkness. Under his face, half overlaid by acrag shaped like a mushroom growth on a tree trunk, entirely obscured until his eyes were close up to it by the thick vegetation, was the open fissure which for thirty days they had searched for in vain. He had sprung to his feet and thrown out his arms and cried, for he had just been doing Archimedes’ Principle at school, ‘Eureka!’
    Where was Peter now? The uncles and aunts presumably knew but Stephen himself hadn’t heard a word of him since he went away to college in London when he was eighteen. That departure to university of a man far less intelligent than himself had been a blow to Stephen. And Dadda’s comment — he occasionally deigned to recognize the existence of the Naulls clan — had done nothing to mitigate his sad resentment. ‘Bloody degree won’t get the lad a living in Naulls’s shop.’ Peter hadn’t been expected to work in the men’s outfitters, never had and never would.
    But even in their search, strictly speaking, it had been Peter who had succeeded and not he. Peter, though fortuitously, had found Apsley Sough. It had been he who, with truth, had cried out, ‘I have found it!’
    Next day they had gone back with ropes and a book on rock-climbing from the library to teach themselves about knots. Dadda would have locked Stephen up if he had known what was going on. Uncle Leonard and Auntie Midge, more appropriately to their characters, would have had nervous breakdowns.
    The hole was not a vertical shaft. If it had been they might not have dared penetrate it very far. It had been bored or dug or had occurred naturally at an incline of about