1 00:00:00,010 --> 00:00:04,710 in the autumn of eighteen ninety seven a crew driving adrift west from the bottom 2 00:00:04,710 --> 00:00:09,530 of a gold shaft three hundred and twelve feet under table mountain in tuolumne 3 00:00:09,530 --> 00:00:15,430 county cal struck a face of rock that rang hollow under the hammer rock does 4 00:00:15,430 --> 00:00:21,630 not ring hollow what lay behind it was not a cave it was not a fissure beyond 5 00:00:21,630 --> 00:00:26,610 the hole opened by one small charge ran a passage walled in pale gray stone with 6 00:00:26,610 --> 00:00:31,610 a paved floor a lantern let down through the hole went thirty-one feet before it 7 00:00:31,610 --> 00:00:36,910 touched at the end of that passage stood an archway two half columns thicker than 8 00:00:36,910 --> 00:00:41,970 a man is tall each belted with three rings of stone and over them a single 9 00:00:41,970 --> 00:00:47,150 keystone standing proud of the arch from the floor to the under side of that 10 00:00:47,150 --> 00:00:52,550 keystone was forty feet two inches the miwok who had lived at the foot of that 11 00:00:52,550 --> 00:00:58,340 mountain long before any miner already had a name for it forty feet is not a 12 00:00:58,340 --> 00:01:02,560 door for a man seven men standing on one another's shoulders could not have 13 00:01:02,560 --> 00:01:07,220 touched that keystone and a door is not built to be looked at it is built to be 14 00:01:07,220 --> 00:01:12,520 gone through the company had the opening boarded shut twenty-two days later in 15 00:01:12,520 --> 00:01:17,140 nineteen hundred the pumps were drawn and the drift went under water but a 16 00:01:17,140 --> 00:01:20,940 mine surveyor's notebook one line pencilled beside a phonograph recording 17 00:01:20,940 --> 00:01:24,840 sixteen years afterward and the measurements of a second man who went 18 00:01:24,840 --> 00:01:29,220 down into the same dark eighteen years afterward all went on pointing at the 19 00:01:29,220 --> 00:01:30,220 same door. 20 00:01:30,240 --> 00:01:32,040 That is where this story begins. 21 00:01:32,900 --> 00:01:37,120 Before we can understand the archway, we need to understand the mountain that 22 00:01:37,120 --> 00:01:41,000 stands on top of it, because Table Mountain was not born a mountain. 23 00:01:41,440 --> 00:01:46,400 It runs through Tuolumne County today as a narrow black ridge with a flat top, 24 00:01:46,620 --> 00:01:51,620 winding for 18 miles from just west of the town of Columbia, down toward the 25 00:01:51,620 --> 00:01:52,620 Stanislaus River. 26 00:01:52,960 --> 00:01:54,620 Its level top is lava. 27 00:01:55,180 --> 00:01:59,040 some ten million years ago lava that came out of the ground high in the 28 00:01:59,040 --> 00:02:04,040 sierra nevada poured into the valley of the stanislaus of that day and ran down 29 00:02:04,040 --> 00:02:08,940 it for more than eighty miles then it cooled over the millions of years that 30 00:02:08,940 --> 00:02:14,280 followed the soft hills on either side of the valley wore away the lava did not 31 00:02:14,280 --> 00:02:18,220 the river bed that had been the lowest ground in the country is now the highest 32 00:02:18,220 --> 00:02:24,120 so under that ridge lies a dead river and in its gravel gold The miners worked 33 00:02:24,120 --> 00:02:29,760 this out in the 1850s. By the end of 1857, more than 8,000 feet of tunnel had 34 00:02:29,760 --> 00:02:30,960 been driven under the ridge. 35 00:02:31,200 --> 00:02:33,480 The method was simple, and it was costly. 36 00:02:33,680 --> 00:02:38,080 A tunnel in from the hillside, or a shaft straight down from the top through 37 00:02:38,080 --> 00:02:38,799 the lava. 38 00:02:38,800 --> 00:02:40,920 The miners called the lava basalt. 39 00:02:41,240 --> 00:02:46,360 Under the basalt lay volcanic ash, under the ash lay the gravel of the river, and 40 00:02:46,360 --> 00:02:50,160 at the very bottom of the gravel, resting on the bedrock, lay the thing 41 00:02:50,160 --> 00:02:51,160 they had come for. 42 00:02:51,760 --> 00:02:56,500 other things came out of those tunnels too in the humbug tunnel fifteen hundred 43 00:02:56,500 --> 00:03:00,980 feet in from the mouth and under the lava men found the bones of a mastodon 44 00:03:00,980 --> 00:03:05,620 stone mortars and pestles were said to have come out of others the state 45 00:03:05,620 --> 00:03:10,360 geologist josiah whitney took those reports seriously and in eighteen eighty 46 00:03:10,360 --> 00:03:15,400 in his great volume on the gold-bearing gravels of the sierra nevada he printed 47 00:03:15,400 --> 00:03:19,900 every piece said to have come from under the lava each with the name of its 48 00:03:19,900 --> 00:03:24,490 finder What became of those finds matters to this story, and we will come 49 00:03:24,490 --> 00:03:28,450 back to it. They decided how the thing in the Ridley shaft would be received. 50 00:03:28,850 --> 00:03:32,630 By 1897 the county was in its second age of gold. 51 00:03:32,910 --> 00:03:37,850 The Sierra Railway had been incorporated that February, and its rails were coming 52 00:03:37,850 --> 00:03:42,270 up from Oakdale, the last spike at Jamestown would be driven on the 10th of 53 00:03:42,270 --> 00:03:43,270 November. 54 00:03:43,330 --> 00:03:47,850 And at the foot of the ridge, in the oak country between Jamestown and Shores 55 00:03:47,850 --> 00:03:52,950 Flat, lived the people who had been there before any of it, the Miwok. The 56 00:03:52,950 --> 00:03:55,130 gold rush had gone straight through their villages. 57 00:03:55,690 --> 00:04:01,050 In 1897 they were still there, cutting cordwood for the mine boilers, working 58 00:04:01,050 --> 00:04:05,770 on the ranches, and gathering on winter nights in their round assembly houses to 59 00:04:05,770 --> 00:04:09,930 hear the old accounts, a single one of which could take a whole night to tell. 60 00:04:10,330 --> 00:04:12,710 One of those accounts concerned this ridge. 61 00:04:12,930 --> 00:04:14,070 They are there today. 62 00:04:14,750 --> 00:04:17,610 That autumn, half a mile west of Shaw's Flat. 63 00:04:18,040 --> 00:04:21,079 On the flat top of the ridge there stood the collar of a shaft. 64 00:04:21,300 --> 00:04:22,960 It was called the Ridley. 65 00:04:23,180 --> 00:04:24,960 The first record is a notebook. 66 00:04:25,360 --> 00:04:30,740 The man who kept it was named Asa Merritt Colby. He was born in March of 67 00:04:30,740 --> 00:04:32,820 1858 in Bath, Maine. 68 00:04:33,180 --> 00:04:37,160 His father was a ship-joiner in the yards there, and Colby learned as a boy 69 00:04:37,160 --> 00:04:41,120 how two timbers are brought together so that a knife-blade will not go between 70 00:04:41,120 --> 00:04:45,750 them. at twenty-one he came to california he carried chain on railroad 71 00:04:45,750 --> 00:04:51,090 surveys then went underground and stayed there in eighteen ninety five the table 72 00:04:51,090 --> 00:04:56,130 mountain deep channel company hired him as its engineer and surveyor the company 73 00:04:56,130 --> 00:05:01,710 kept its office in san francisco and its mine was the ridley shaft in october of 74 00:05:01,710 --> 00:05:06,310 eighteen ninety seven colby was thirty-nine years old and he stood five 75 00:05:06,310 --> 00:05:11,380 feet eight inches those who have read his other surviving notebooks say the 76 00:05:11,380 --> 00:05:14,380 same thing of all of them, Colby did not interpret. 77 00:05:14,780 --> 00:05:19,560 A vein cut off where it should have run on, water he could not account for, a 78 00:05:19,560 --> 00:05:21,140 compass needle that would not settle. 79 00:05:21,360 --> 00:05:25,940 In every case he wrote down what he had measured and what he had seen, and left 80 00:05:25,940 --> 00:05:29,740 the meaning to whoever opened the book after him. The man who wrote the pages 81 00:05:29,740 --> 00:05:31,700 that follow was not known for his imagination. 82 00:05:32,280 --> 00:05:34,640 The shaft had taken two years to sink. 83 00:05:34,860 --> 00:05:40,520 On Colby's section sheet the figures stand in a column, 152 feet of basalt. 84 00:05:40,830 --> 00:05:47,370 96 feet of ash and sand, 64 feet of gravel, 312 in all. At the bottom the 85 00:05:47,370 --> 00:05:52,230 crew stood on bedrock and turned west, following the rim of the old river, and 86 00:05:52,230 --> 00:05:53,510 there the bedrock changed. 87 00:05:53,770 --> 00:05:58,110 The belt of pale, veined limestone that is quarried for marble at Columbia 88 00:05:58,110 --> 00:06:01,230 passes under the ridge at exactly that place. 89 00:06:01,790 --> 00:06:06,430 The notebook is headed Underground Survey Book, No. 3, the page for 90 00:06:06,430 --> 00:06:09,310 Thursday, 14 October, 1897. 91 00:06:10,030 --> 00:06:15,090 opens like any other day the shift the number of men the footage made then 92 00:06:15,090 --> 00:06:21,530 comes one line face sounds hollow at two hundred and fourteen feet from shaft the 93 00:06:21,530 --> 00:06:25,830 man who heard it first was a miner from columbia twenty-six years old named 94 00:06:25,830 --> 00:06:30,670 daniel shea he told the shift boss giacomo ferretti and ferretti sent up 95 00:06:30,670 --> 00:06:35,070 for colby colby came down took the hammer in his own hand and struck the 96 00:06:35,070 --> 00:06:40,030 face in four places then they loaded a small charge when the dust had settled 97 00:06:40,030 --> 00:06:43,870 there was a hole in the face a yard across and beyond the hole there was 98 00:06:43,870 --> 00:06:49,290 nothing no far wall no roof no floor only a dark that gave the lantern 99 00:06:49,290 --> 00:06:55,070 nothing back and cold unmoving air against their faces they tied a lantern 100 00:06:55,070 --> 00:06:59,810 to a line and let it down ferretti paid the line out through his hands a fathom 101 00:06:59,810 --> 00:07:04,790 at a time the lantern went down thirty-one feet and touched stone colby 102 00:07:04,790 --> 00:07:09,020 looked over the edge of the hole and wrote the second line of that day floor 103 00:07:09,020 --> 00:07:13,440 is paved at two in the afternoon they put him in an ore bucket and lowered him 104 00:07:13,440 --> 00:07:18,060 on a hand windlass rigged in the drift he had with him a lantern a steel tape 105 00:07:18,060 --> 00:07:22,880 and the notebook his feet touched and the rope went slack ferretti said 106 00:07:22,880 --> 00:07:26,920 afterward that he looked at his watch twice that afternoon for eleven minutes 107 00:07:26,920 --> 00:07:31,640 not one sound came up from below what colby saw in those eleven minutes is in 108 00:07:31,640 --> 00:07:37,080 the book when the light first fell on it the wall looked to him like one piece an 109 00:07:37,080 --> 00:07:42,180 unbroken face of pale stone running away in both directions only when he brought 110 00:07:42,180 --> 00:07:46,560 the lantern close and moved it along the surface did the joints appear there were 111 00:07:46,560 --> 00:07:51,060 level joints five feet nine inches apart and upright joints eleven feet six 112 00:07:51,060 --> 00:07:56,860 inches apart the wall was not one piece it had been laid he took out his pocket 113 00:07:56,860 --> 00:08:02,160 -knife and set the blade against a joint it would not enter he tried another and 114 00:08:02,160 --> 00:08:06,130 it would not enter he tore a leaf from the notebook and tried the edge of the 115 00:08:06,130 --> 00:08:10,810 paper and that would not enter either then he wrote down a word he had from 116 00:08:10,810 --> 00:08:15,650 his father's shipyard a word that belongs to masons and joiners walls 117 00:08:15,650 --> 00:08:21,570 dressed and fitted dressed means finished it means intended it says that 118 00:08:21,570 --> 00:08:26,830 some one came here first with tools and with time and with a plan then he lifted 119 00:08:26,830 --> 00:08:30,850 the lantern and walked west along the passage when he put the tape on it 120 00:08:30,850 --> 00:08:35,240 afterward from end to end It came to one hundred and eighty-eight feet. 121 00:08:35,580 --> 00:08:37,679 He did not see the archway at once. 122 00:08:38,100 --> 00:08:42,919 His light reached first only two pale rounded masses going up on either hand, 123 00:08:43,020 --> 00:08:46,880 and for a moment Colby took them for two walls running to the roof. 124 00:08:47,260 --> 00:08:51,560 Then he raised the light and went on raising it. The light was not enough. 125 00:08:52,020 --> 00:08:55,820 When at last he called up to the men at the hole, he said one thing. 126 00:08:56,100 --> 00:08:57,640 He asked for another ladder. 127 00:08:58,020 --> 00:08:59,860 Nobody told the company that day. 128 00:09:00,280 --> 00:09:04,480 the superintendent of the mine orrin lathrop came down on the evening shift 129 00:09:04,480 --> 00:09:09,060 looked a long time from the edge of the hole and gave the crew a single order 130 00:09:09,060 --> 00:09:14,160 until san francisco answered what had been seen in this drift would stay in 131 00:09:14,160 --> 00:09:19,440 this drift lathrop did not post his letter for four days by ferretti's later 132 00:09:19,440 --> 00:09:24,060 account the delay had nothing to do with hiding it the men did not know how to 133 00:09:24,060 --> 00:09:29,020 write down a thing for which their trade had no word colby knew he was a surveyor 134 00:09:29,670 --> 00:09:34,150 that evening he did not write in the book what it was he wrote how high it 135 00:09:34,150 --> 00:09:39,550 was the second record is the archway itself it fills fourteen pages of 136 00:09:39,550 --> 00:09:44,690 colby's notebook and there is not one adjective of wonder on any of them he 137 00:09:44,690 --> 00:09:50,190 measured the height twice the first time on friday the fifteenth of october he 138 00:09:50,190 --> 00:09:54,550 set his transit on the floor of the passage ran a base line of sixty feet 139 00:09:54,550 --> 00:09:59,270 back from the threshold and sighted on the lower edge of the keystone The 140 00:09:59,270 --> 00:10:02,670 figure that came out of the angle was 40 feet 2 inches. 141 00:10:02,930 --> 00:10:07,050 He did not trust it. He had the timbermen build a staging of mine 142 00:10:07,050 --> 00:10:11,210 timbers inside the passage, and it took them three days to carry it to the crown 143 00:10:11,210 --> 00:10:12,029 of the arch. 144 00:10:12,030 --> 00:10:17,450 On Friday the 22nd, he climbed to the top plank, set the end of the steel tape 145 00:10:17,450 --> 00:10:21,510 against the underside of the keystone, and dropped the other end to Ferretti on 146 00:10:21,510 --> 00:10:22,449 the floor. 147 00:10:22,450 --> 00:10:23,810 40 feet 2 inches. 148 00:10:24,170 --> 00:10:27,050 The opening was 21 feet 6 inches wide. 149 00:10:27,560 --> 00:10:31,940 The arch was a true half circle, and it sprang from the tops of the two columns, 150 00:10:32,160 --> 00:10:34,780 twenty-nine feet five inches above the floor. 151 00:10:35,140 --> 00:10:39,480 The columns were round shafts, sunk to half their thickness in the wall. 152 00:10:39,860 --> 00:10:42,220 Each was seven feet four inches through. 153 00:10:42,500 --> 00:10:47,500 Each stood on a plain base a foot high, and was built of four drums set one on 154 00:10:47,500 --> 00:10:50,340 another, every drum six and a half feet tall. 155 00:10:50,880 --> 00:10:55,560 at the three places where the drums met a flat ring of stone ran right around 156 00:10:55,560 --> 00:11:01,620 the shaft sixteen inches high and standing out five inches three rings at 157 00:11:01,620 --> 00:11:05,680 the same heights on both columns the lowest of them two feet above colby's 158 00:11:05,680 --> 00:11:09,940 head at the top of each column sat a plain cap that widened upward in two 159 00:11:09,940 --> 00:11:15,100 steps there was no ornament and no writing there was no carving no relief 160 00:11:15,100 --> 00:11:16,720 no mark of any kind 161 00:11:17,480 --> 00:11:23,020 The whole surface was, in Colby's words, smooth to the palm, and it carried none 162 00:11:23,020 --> 00:11:27,480 of the marks a chisel or a pick would have left. The stone was the same pale 163 00:11:27,480 --> 00:11:31,900 grey limestone as the walls of the passage, and fine bluish veins ran 164 00:11:31,900 --> 00:11:35,180 through it. In every block the veins ran the same way. 165 00:11:35,620 --> 00:11:37,480 Colby gave that a line to itself. 166 00:11:37,880 --> 00:11:42,240 It was as though the whole archway had been cut from one quarry face, and the 167 00:11:42,240 --> 00:11:45,000 stones set up again in the order they had lain in the rock. 168 00:11:45,530 --> 00:11:51,110 the keystone was one piece it was a wedge nine feet four inches tall six 169 00:11:51,110 --> 00:11:55,830 feet two inches across the top and four feet across the bottom and it stood 170 00:11:55,830 --> 00:12:00,610 eleven inches forward of the arch stones on either side colby worked out its 171 00:12:00,610 --> 00:12:05,610 volume and wrote its weight in the margin close to twenty tons twenty tons 172 00:12:05,610 --> 00:12:10,030 of stone had been set forty feet above the floor and fitted between its two 173 00:12:10,030 --> 00:12:14,720 neighbours so that a knife-blade would not go in But the strangest line in the 174 00:12:14,720 --> 00:12:16,140 book is not about weight. 175 00:12:16,540 --> 00:12:20,620 On top of the staging, Colby put his hand flat against the underside of the 176 00:12:20,620 --> 00:12:24,280 keystone, and there, in the stone, he found a hollow. 177 00:12:24,540 --> 00:12:28,560 It was three feet long and three quarters of an inch deep at the deepest, 178 00:12:28,820 --> 00:12:30,620 and its edges were not sharp. 179 00:12:30,840 --> 00:12:35,140 The inside of it was polished, brighter than any other part of the archway. 180 00:12:35,700 --> 00:12:37,580 Colby's own comparison is this. 181 00:12:37,900 --> 00:12:43,630 Like the curb of a well, or the head of a low cellar door, where heads and hands 182 00:12:43,630 --> 00:12:49,330 have gone for generations and then one line more but this is forty feet from 183 00:12:49,330 --> 00:12:54,330 the floor the same ware showed in one other place and that was the threshold 184 00:12:54,330 --> 00:12:59,490 between the two columns lay a single stone the full width of the opening and 185 00:12:59,490 --> 00:13:03,690 the middle of that stone was worn down into a shallow trough like a step on a 186 00:13:03,690 --> 00:13:08,750 stair that has been climbed for a very long time of what lay beyond the archway 187 00:13:08,750 --> 00:13:10,510 colby could write very little 188 00:13:11,420 --> 00:13:15,480 The passage went on at the same width under a vaulted roof, and its floor fell 189 00:13:15,480 --> 00:13:17,920 away, one foot down in every six. 190 00:13:18,320 --> 00:13:23,860 Thirty-eight feet past the threshold the water began, clear, cold, and perfectly 191 00:13:23,860 --> 00:13:28,880 still. By lantern light the paved floor could be seen going on down the slope 192 00:13:28,880 --> 00:13:31,440 under the water, and then the light gave out. 193 00:13:31,950 --> 00:13:36,150 colby tied his plumb bob to the end of the tape and let it run down the incline 194 00:13:36,150 --> 00:13:41,230 sixty feet past the threshold the water was three feet eight inches deep and the 195 00:13:41,230 --> 00:13:46,070 floor was still going down there his tape ended he could not measure where 196 00:13:46,070 --> 00:13:51,850 the archway led only that it led down at the other end of the passage the east 197 00:13:51,850 --> 00:13:56,610 end there was no archway there the walls and the paving simply broke off and 198 00:13:56,610 --> 00:14:00,390 against the broken end packed to the roof stood the hardened river gravel 199 00:14:00,390 --> 00:14:05,210 that the miners called cement colby drew that end as well and under the drawing 200 00:14:05,210 --> 00:14:10,770 he wrote four words gravel lies against masonry to see what those four words 201 00:14:10,770 --> 00:14:15,470 mean we have to look at how a find like this was met in california in eighteen 202 00:14:15,470 --> 00:14:19,550 ninety seven it was not the first impossible thing to come out from under 203 00:14:19,550 --> 00:14:24,630 table mountain and science had learned what to say to news of that kind it had 204 00:14:24,630 --> 00:14:29,950 learned the hard way on the twenty fifth of february eighteen sixty six fifteen 205 00:14:29,950 --> 00:14:35,690 miles northwest of the ridge at bald hill in calaveras county a human skull 206 00:14:35,690 --> 00:14:40,290 was reported from a mine shaft a hundred and thirty feet down and under the lava 207 00:14:40,290 --> 00:14:44,230 that summer whitney laid the skull before the california academy of 208 00:14:44,230 --> 00:14:49,410 sciences and announced that man on this continent was older than the lava thirty 209 00:14:49,410 --> 00:14:51,230 years later The claim fell. 210 00:14:51,530 --> 00:14:56,610 The skull had come from an Indian burial ground nearby, and had been put down the 211 00:14:56,610 --> 00:14:58,230 shaft as a storekeeper's joke. 212 00:14:58,850 --> 00:15:03,770 The man who put the fall of all this on record was William Henry Holmes, head 213 00:15:03,770 --> 00:15:07,210 curator of anthropology at the National Museum of the Smithsonian. 214 00:15:07,790 --> 00:15:13,990 Holmes came out to California in 1898, and he did not only read papers, he went 215 00:15:13,990 --> 00:15:16,470 into the old tunnels under Table Mountain himself. 216 00:15:17,180 --> 00:15:21,240 he looked at the faces the mortars were said to have come from he went through 217 00:15:21,240 --> 00:15:25,300 the waste dumps at the tunnel mouths he talked one by one with the mine 218 00:15:25,300 --> 00:15:29,320 superintendents who were still living and he noted how their accounts had 219 00:15:29,320 --> 00:15:33,560 shifted over the years the review he published in eighteen ninety nine is 220 00:15:33,560 --> 00:15:39,060 hard and it is fair its conclusion is this Every object said to have come from 221 00:15:39,060 --> 00:15:42,660 under the lava had either worked its way into the tunnels from the Indian 222 00:15:42,660 --> 00:15:47,080 villages on the slopes above, or was one of the jokes that miners play on one 223 00:15:47,080 --> 00:15:48,860 another and on visiting gentlemen. 224 00:15:49,500 --> 00:15:54,360 That account is very probably correct, and for the Calavera's skull it is 225 00:15:54,360 --> 00:15:55,360 certainly correct. 226 00:15:55,980 --> 00:16:00,800 And yet Holmes was an honest man, and in his review he did not hide the one piece 227 00:16:00,800 --> 00:16:02,100 he could not dispose of. 228 00:16:02,400 --> 00:16:06,240 it was a pestle that the geologist clarence king had taken with his own 229 00:16:06,240 --> 00:16:11,740 hands years before out of the gravel of table mountain and it lay by then in the 230 00:16:11,740 --> 00:16:15,920 smithsonian's collection of that find holmes wrote that it may not be 231 00:16:15,920 --> 00:16:21,020 challenged with impunity he looked for another way to account for it by his own 232 00:16:21,020 --> 00:16:26,760 statement no definite result was reached on that same journey holmes heard of the 233 00:16:26,760 --> 00:16:29,720 ridley shaft there is one entry in his notebook 234 00:16:30,430 --> 00:16:32,370 Ridley Shaft, Table Mountain. 235 00:16:33,490 --> 00:16:38,030 Company's surveyor reports a walled passage and an arch on the 312 level, 236 00:16:38,230 --> 00:16:41,670 opening closed by order of the company. Not seen. 237 00:16:41,990 --> 00:16:44,730 Probably a cavern in the marble. The columns. 238 00:16:45,010 --> 00:16:46,010 Dripstone. 239 00:16:46,550 --> 00:16:51,170 That, too, is a perfectly sensible reading. The limestone of this belt 240 00:16:51,170 --> 00:16:53,090 really is full of caverns. 241 00:16:53,410 --> 00:16:55,310 Marble does break into square blocks. 242 00:16:55,920 --> 00:17:00,460 columns of dripstone do carry bands of growth ring above ring by lantern light 243 00:17:00,460 --> 00:17:06,180 to an excited man all of that might pass for a wall and a pair of columns it does 244 00:17:06,180 --> 00:17:10,060 not explain a joint that falls at five feet nine inches in every one of eight 245 00:17:10,060 --> 00:17:15,540 courses it does not explain a floor paved crosswise it does not explain a 246 00:17:15,540 --> 00:17:19,960 polished hollow forty feet above that floor and it does not explain the gravel 247 00:17:19,960 --> 00:17:24,560 at all holmes's whole case rested on objects that had got into the gravel 248 00:17:24,560 --> 00:17:29,380 afterward here the gravel had come afterward and lay against the object 249 00:17:29,380 --> 00:17:34,580 holmes did not see the opening and in the review he published the ridley shaft 250 00:17:34,580 --> 00:17:38,520 is not named but at the foot of that ridge there was a man who was not 251 00:17:38,520 --> 00:17:43,100 surprised to hear that the door was there the third record does not begin on 252 00:17:43,100 --> 00:17:48,640 paper it begins as a voice and it reaches paper only years later by other 253 00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:55,020 hands the old accounts of the mewok were not written they were told in winter at 254 00:17:55,020 --> 00:18:00,580 night in the round assembly house by the light of a small fire there were men who 255 00:18:00,580 --> 00:18:04,300 made a calling of it going from village to village and telling in the assembly 256 00:18:04,300 --> 00:18:09,540 house of each some of those accounts did reach paper years after the ridley shaft 257 00:18:09,540 --> 00:18:14,720 through two different men both men are real and the work of both can be read in 258 00:18:14,720 --> 00:18:19,720 a library to-day the first was the naturalist c hart merriam for twenty 259 00:18:19,720 --> 00:18:24,280 years he sat with miwok elders along the foothills of the sierra and in nineteen 260 00:18:24,280 --> 00:18:29,200 ten he published what he had been told his book describes a being spoken of by 261 00:18:29,200 --> 00:18:34,680 the northern miwok of calaveras county a giant made of rock he carries a basket 262 00:18:34,680 --> 00:18:40,040 of rock on his back he lives in caves and merriam sets down where one at 263 00:18:40,040 --> 00:18:45,290 murphy's one on the stanislaus river he comes out only at night and because of 264 00:18:45,290 --> 00:18:50,430 him the miwok never lay there dead in a cave merriam put a footnote to that 265 00:18:50,430 --> 00:18:55,550 passage to suppose that the human bones found in the caves of these foothills 266 00:18:55,550 --> 00:19:00,370 were placed there by the indians now living in the region is he wrote an 267 00:19:00,370 --> 00:19:05,650 error the miwok burn there dead and look on the cave with horror if there are 268 00:19:05,650 --> 00:19:10,900 bones they belong to some one who came before the second was a young museum man 269 00:19:10,900 --> 00:19:15,700 from the university of california edward gifford in nineteen thirteen and 270 00:19:15,700 --> 00:19:20,500 nineteen fourteen he came to tuolumne county with a phonograph recorded the 271 00:19:20,500 --> 00:19:24,800 accounts in the miwok language on wax cylinders and translated them sentence 272 00:19:24,800 --> 00:19:30,280 by sentence of the fourteen he printed eleven were told by one man who lived at 273 00:19:30,280 --> 00:19:34,380 jamestown his name was thomas williams and he had once been one of those 274 00:19:34,380 --> 00:19:38,720 travelling tellers One of the accounts Williams gave is called Yayali. 275 00:19:39,320 --> 00:19:43,920 Yayali is a giant who comes up the mountain from below, shouting, with a 276 00:19:43,920 --> 00:19:47,080 basket on his back, and his voice carries over the hills. 277 00:19:47,580 --> 00:19:51,700 Against the doors of the house he enters, and against its smoke-hole, he 278 00:19:51,700 --> 00:19:55,020 rolls boulders, so that those inside cannot get out. 279 00:19:55,280 --> 00:19:59,740 He is so tall that when he dances in the assembly house, his head goes out 280 00:19:59,740 --> 00:20:00,740 through the smoke-hole. 281 00:20:01,120 --> 00:20:04,440 At the end of the account a woman runs to the house of her father. 282 00:20:04,830 --> 00:20:09,850 Her father spits on the door. The door is a great rock. The house, and 283 00:20:09,850 --> 00:20:11,550 everything around it, turns to stone. 284 00:20:12,070 --> 00:20:15,130 Under that account, Gifford printed a note one line long. 285 00:20:15,890 --> 00:20:18,750 Yayali's home was on Table Mountain near Jamestown. 286 00:20:19,190 --> 00:20:23,710 A second teller, William Fuller of Soulsbyville, gives the death of the 287 00:20:23,710 --> 00:20:26,070 same giant, and he points to a place. 288 00:20:26,490 --> 00:20:30,830 The white rocks near Columbia are his bleached bones. The white rocks near 289 00:20:30,830 --> 00:20:34,230 Columbia are real. They are that pale, veined limestone. 290 00:20:34,810 --> 00:20:39,610 none of this was in print in october of eighteen ninety seven merriam's book lay 291 00:20:39,610 --> 00:20:44,890 thirteen years ahead gifford's cylinders sixteen no miner at the head of the 292 00:20:44,890 --> 00:20:49,630 ridley shaft could have read any of it on a page but the accounts were there 293 00:20:49,630 --> 00:20:54,270 they were at the foot of the ridge and on saturday the twenty third of october 294 00:20:54,270 --> 00:20:58,030 eighteen ninety seven one of them walked up to the collar of the shaft 295 00:20:58,900 --> 00:21:03,560 colby's entry for that day runs to two pages and it is the only entry in the 296 00:21:03,560 --> 00:21:08,960 book with no measurement in it the hoist boiler at the shaft burned wood and the 297 00:21:08,960 --> 00:21:12,580 wood was cut and hauled from the oak flats at the foot of the ridge by a crew 298 00:21:12,580 --> 00:21:16,840 of mewok men from the village toward jamestown at the head of that crew was 299 00:21:16,840 --> 00:21:21,900 an old man colby did not write his name he calls him only the wood contractor 300 00:21:21,900 --> 00:21:27,370 that saturday when his wagon had been unloaded the old man did not leave He 301 00:21:27,370 --> 00:21:31,290 stood on the flat lava beside the collar of the shaft and waited for Colby. 302 00:21:31,670 --> 00:21:36,770 In spite of Lathrop's order, the news had taken nine days to get out. The old 303 00:21:36,770 --> 00:21:37,770 man asked nothing. 304 00:21:37,930 --> 00:21:42,950 His English was the English of a man who has learned a language after forty, slow 305 00:21:42,950 --> 00:21:44,030 and complete. 306 00:21:44,790 --> 00:21:47,930 He told Colby what the old people said about this ridge. 307 00:21:48,450 --> 00:21:50,750 They said the top used to be the bottom. 308 00:21:51,170 --> 00:21:54,230 They said he lives under the mountain, not on it. 309 00:21:54,730 --> 00:21:59,750 he comes there from below and he calls as he comes they said that under the 310 00:21:59,750 --> 00:22:04,930 mountain on the shore's flat side there is a place and that the place has a name 311 00:22:04,930 --> 00:22:10,130 the old man gave the name first in his own language colby could not write it 312 00:22:10,130 --> 00:22:16,070 then he gave it in english and colby set it down between quotation marks where he 313 00:22:16,070 --> 00:22:20,770 bends his head they said the dead are not put inside the rock the inside of 314 00:22:20,770 --> 00:22:24,890 the rock belongs to some one else they said that place is not entered from the 315 00:22:24,890 --> 00:22:29,970 side colby asked what that meant the old man lifted his hand toward the east 316 00:22:29,970 --> 00:22:35,010 toward the side where the dead river lies under the ridge his door is on that 317 00:22:35,010 --> 00:22:40,210 side he said you came in by the side that evening colby put a note against 318 00:22:40,210 --> 00:22:44,910 the first of those sayings every miner in this county knows the top was once 319 00:22:44,910 --> 00:22:49,810 the bottom and the man has cut wood for the mines for thirty years against the 320 00:22:49,810 --> 00:22:54,980 other sayings he put no note colby showed him the drawing the archway the 321 00:22:54,980 --> 00:23:00,240 two columns the rings the old man looked at the page for a long time he counted 322 00:23:00,240 --> 00:23:05,180 the rings with his finger three of them and he nodded then he gave the page back 323 00:23:05,180 --> 00:23:09,960 and when he was asked whether he would go down and see it he said no it is not 324 00:23:09,960 --> 00:23:15,820 a thing to look at twice he said before he left he asked for one thing and colby 325 00:23:15,820 --> 00:23:22,140 wrote it word for word when you close it close it with stone not with wood At the 326 00:23:22,140 --> 00:23:27,480 foot of those two pages, Colby added one sentence of his own. He had not spoken 327 00:23:27,480 --> 00:23:30,440 of the hollow under the keystone to anyone above ground. 328 00:23:31,080 --> 00:23:35,240 No one knew of it but Ferretti, and the old man had not asked about the hollow. 329 00:23:35,460 --> 00:23:38,240 He had no need to. He had given its name. 330 00:23:38,800 --> 00:23:43,540 Here, at the collar of a shaft, the two records come to stand side by side. 331 00:23:43,860 --> 00:23:45,320 One is a surveyor's notebook. 332 00:23:45,780 --> 00:23:50,360 It was written on Friday the 22nd of October, and it says this. 333 00:23:50,920 --> 00:23:56,280 forty feet two inches above the floor on the under side of the keystone there is 334 00:23:56,280 --> 00:24:00,880 a shallow hollow polished like the head of a doorway where heads have gone for 335 00:24:00,880 --> 00:24:06,800 generations the other is a name it was spoken the next day by a man who had 336 00:24:06,800 --> 00:24:11,160 never been underground and had never been told of the hollow and his people 337 00:24:11,160 --> 00:24:15,760 had been using it since long before the first pick was put into this ridge where 338 00:24:15,760 --> 00:24:20,860 he bends his head and there is a second pair the note-book says that the east 339 00:24:20,860 --> 00:24:24,720 end of the passage is broken off and that the broken end is packed to the 340 00:24:24,720 --> 00:24:28,720 roof with the gravel of the old river which is to say that the place this 341 00:24:28,720 --> 00:24:33,860 passage once opened on to is the valley now lying under the lava the old man 342 00:24:33,860 --> 00:24:38,760 never went down and he never saw that end in the drawing he lifted his hand 343 00:24:38,760 --> 00:24:43,840 toward the east his door is on that side a note-book can be shelved under the 344 00:24:43,840 --> 00:24:48,640 wrong county and it can burn A name cannot be put on the wrong shelf while 345 00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:50,340 there is a living person to say it. 346 00:24:50,960 --> 00:24:52,640 Colby did not sleep that night. 347 00:24:53,000 --> 00:24:57,020 At one o'clock on Sunday morning, the one night of the week with no shift 348 00:24:57,020 --> 00:24:59,420 below, he went down the shaft alone. 349 00:24:59,860 --> 00:25:01,220 He did not write why. 350 00:25:01,560 --> 00:25:02,920 He wrote what he did. 351 00:25:03,260 --> 00:25:08,320 He walked the drift, and climbed down the thirty-one feet of rope ladder that 352 00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:10,000 had been hung in the hole that week. 353 00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:14,860 he walked the passage to its west end with one lantern his own footsteps 354 00:25:14,860 --> 00:25:20,260 coming back to him off eight courses of stone and climbed the staging on the top 355 00:25:20,260 --> 00:25:24,700 plank he stood upright and set the lantern down at his feet then he lifted 356 00:25:24,700 --> 00:25:29,940 his hand and laid his palm in the hollow the stone was cold and in the word he 357 00:25:29,940 --> 00:25:34,460 used as slick as a stair-rail colby stood there with his head two feet under 358 00:25:34,460 --> 00:25:39,160 the keystone and thirty-two feet of empty air below his boots he knew his 359 00:25:39,160 --> 00:25:42,730 own height and he knew now the height of the opening he was standing in. 360 00:25:43,110 --> 00:25:46,570 And he saw and wrote down something he had missed by day. 361 00:25:46,850 --> 00:25:49,270 The hollow was not in the middle of the keystone. 362 00:25:49,510 --> 00:25:54,490 It lay seven inches to the south, toward the left-hand column, like a man who 363 00:25:54,490 --> 00:25:57,410 goes through every doorway with the same shoulder first. 364 00:25:58,150 --> 00:26:02,030 Colby wrote that sentence, and then ruled a single line through it. 365 00:26:02,290 --> 00:26:04,190 It can still be read under the line. 366 00:26:04,550 --> 00:26:06,550 It was then that he heard the sound. 367 00:26:06,910 --> 00:26:08,810 It came from beyond the archway. 368 00:26:09,200 --> 00:26:14,260 from the water at the foot of the incline it was low and it was regular to 369 00:26:14,260 --> 00:26:18,960 describe it colby used the one comparison his trade gave him like a man 370 00:26:18,960 --> 00:26:23,500 calling from the bottom of a shaft he came down off the staging crossed the 371 00:26:23,500 --> 00:26:27,680 threshold and walked down the incline to the edge of the water he took out his 372 00:26:27,680 --> 00:26:32,620 watch the sound came once in every nine seconds and it neither quickened nor 373 00:26:32,620 --> 00:26:37,760 slowed the flame of his lantern in a place with no wind at all leaned a 374 00:26:37,760 --> 00:26:42,430 little inward through the archway and out at the limit of the light the water 375 00:26:42,430 --> 00:26:48,350 he had seen every day as still as glass was moving slow wide rings coming out of 376 00:26:48,350 --> 00:26:53,510 the dark toward the threshold the old man had said it the day before he calls 377 00:26:53,510 --> 00:26:58,970 as he comes there may be an explanation and it will have its turn that night 378 00:26:58,970 --> 00:27:04,150 colby did not write what he thought he wrote what he heard and beside it the 379 00:27:04,150 --> 00:27:09,910 one thing he could measure which was time sound from the incline low regular 380 00:27:09,910 --> 00:27:15,990 stayed one hour it did not come nearer what that line means the notebook does 381 00:27:15,990 --> 00:27:22,230 not say the old man did not say neither will we nine days later san francisco 382 00:27:22,230 --> 00:27:27,210 answered the company's answer came on tuesday the second of november eighteen 383 00:27:27,210 --> 00:27:33,470 ninety seven as a telegram it was ten words long resume west lead close the 384 00:27:33,470 --> 00:27:36,070 opening no visitors letter follows 385 00:27:37,100 --> 00:27:42,000 no letter ever followed the opening was closed three days later on friday the 386 00:27:42,000 --> 00:27:46,980 fifth two sets of mine timber with heavy planking spiked across them from wall to 387 00:27:46,980 --> 00:27:51,640 wall colby had asked for lime mortar and two days of labour to build a wall of 388 00:27:51,640 --> 00:27:57,600 stone lathrop refused the rails would be in jamestown in five days and that week 389 00:27:57,600 --> 00:28:02,220 the company wanted every man it had on pay gravel the last entry in the book 390 00:28:02,220 --> 00:28:07,970 about the archway is two sentences long closed with timber I asked for stone. 391 00:28:08,190 --> 00:28:13,030 The west lead was followed for two more years, then it pinched and was gone. 392 00:28:13,410 --> 00:28:19,090 On Monday, the 12th of March, 1900, the pumps were drawn, the water came back, 393 00:28:19,190 --> 00:28:21,850 at its own pace, to the 312 level. 394 00:28:22,210 --> 00:28:27,250 The fourth record is a second man, who went down into the same dark 18 years 395 00:28:27,250 --> 00:28:31,030 later, and that man had never heard the name of Asa Colby. 396 00:28:31,720 --> 00:28:36,840 In January of 1915, a new company, which had been quietly buying up ground along 397 00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:41,420 the ridge for years, announced that it was driving a tunnel a mile long to 398 00:28:41,420 --> 00:28:43,240 drain the water from under Table Mountain. 399 00:28:43,760 --> 00:28:47,820 As the tunnel went forward, the water in the old workings went down. 400 00:28:48,060 --> 00:28:51,780 The Ridley shaft was re-timbered to give the new tunnel air. 401 00:28:52,100 --> 00:28:56,600 The job was handed to the company's assistant engineer, Leland Hartwell 402 00:28:56,600 --> 00:28:59,480 Fisk, born in Sacramento in 1888. 403 00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:04,480 a mining engineer out of stanford in nineteen eleven and twenty-seven years 404 00:29:04,480 --> 00:29:10,480 old on tuesday the eighteenth of may nineteen fifteen fisk went into the west 405 00:29:10,480 --> 00:29:15,500 drift to see what state the old levels were in at two hundred and fourteen feet 406 00:29:15,500 --> 00:29:20,500 he came up against a bulkhead of timber according to his report after fifteen 407 00:29:20,500 --> 00:29:25,780 years under water it had the firmness of wet bread he put his shoulder to it and 408 00:29:25,780 --> 00:29:30,840 went through through the hole behind it he let down his carbide lamp on a cord 409 00:29:30,840 --> 00:29:37,000 thirty-one feet fiske spent the next sixteen days in that passage and without 410 00:29:37,000 --> 00:29:41,780 knowing that colby had ever lived he did again everything colby had done the 411 00:29:41,780 --> 00:29:46,060 length of the passage by steel tape one hundred and eighty-eight feet three 412 00:29:46,060 --> 00:29:51,870 inches the courses of stone five feet nine inches eight of them the inside 413 00:29:51,870 --> 00:29:56,110 height of the archway by transit forty feet one and three quarter inches 414 00:29:56,110 --> 00:30:01,250 between the figures of two men who never met taken eighteen years apart the 415 00:30:01,250 --> 00:30:05,290 difference is one quarter of an inch then he understood that some one had 416 00:30:05,290 --> 00:30:10,190 been there before him inside the passage in front of the archway stood a staging 417 00:30:10,190 --> 00:30:14,930 of timber black and slimed over but still upright and on the lowest drum of 418 00:30:14,930 --> 00:30:19,700 the south column at the height of a man's eye there was a line of pencil a m 419 00:30:19,700 --> 00:30:25,720 c october twenty second ninety seven forty feet two inches fiske went looking 420 00:30:25,720 --> 00:30:30,060 for the owner of those initials the man who could give him the name was a 421 00:30:30,060 --> 00:30:35,880 retired shift boss living in columbia sixty-two years old giacomo ferretti and 422 00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:40,800 ferretti did not know where colby had gone the eleven minutes of silence the 423 00:30:40,800 --> 00:30:45,200 two looks at the watch and the reason the letter was four days late are all 424 00:30:45,200 --> 00:30:50,230 known to-day from what ferretti told fiske that summer Fisk did not climb the 425 00:30:50,230 --> 00:30:54,470 old staging, because he did not trust it, but he saw something Colby could not 426 00:30:54,470 --> 00:30:58,130 have seen, because the water was no longer where Colby had left it. 427 00:30:58,510 --> 00:31:03,110 In 1897, the water began 38 feet past the threshold. 428 00:31:03,450 --> 00:31:09,310 In 1915, with the drainage tunnel running, it began 104 feet past it, 429 00:31:09,430 --> 00:31:11,690 which is to say it had dropped 11 feet. 430 00:31:12,160 --> 00:31:17,320 fiske walked those hundred and four feet at that point the vault ended the walls 431 00:31:17,320 --> 00:31:21,500 fell back on either side and the light of his carbide lamp went out into 432 00:31:21,500 --> 00:31:27,020 something that was not a passage it was a hall out of the water fifty-six feet 433 00:31:27,020 --> 00:31:33,040 beyond rose a second archway the same pale stone the same half-circle the same 434 00:31:33,040 --> 00:31:38,460 keystone standing proud the same round columns on either hand, except that on 435 00:31:38,460 --> 00:31:42,640 these, above the line of the water, there were not three rings to count but 436 00:31:42,640 --> 00:31:45,700 four. Fisk set his transit at the water's edge. 437 00:31:45,900 --> 00:31:48,720 Between the columns it was thirty-one feet six inches. 438 00:31:49,040 --> 00:31:53,080 The underside of the keystone was forty-four feet above the surface of the 439 00:31:53,080 --> 00:31:57,920 water, and by his reckoning from the slope, the threshold of that archway lay 440 00:31:57,920 --> 00:31:59,300 under nine feet of water. 441 00:31:59,820 --> 00:32:03,540 The first door was forty feet, the second was fifty-three. 442 00:32:04,140 --> 00:32:08,400 fiske went to the east end as well the place where colby had written that the 443 00:32:08,400 --> 00:32:14,160 gravel lies against the masonry there he did the one thing colby had not done he 444 00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:19,340 tried with his hammer to part the gravel from the wall it would not part the 445 00:32:19,340 --> 00:32:23,380 gravel was bonded to the faces of the broken blocks as if it had been welded 446 00:32:23,380 --> 00:32:27,980 there and it had filled the very gaps between them two feet out from the 447 00:32:27,980 --> 00:32:32,760 broken wall he worked a tooth out of that hardened gravel the size of a fist 448 00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:35,100 with rounded humps along its crown. 449 00:32:35,380 --> 00:32:39,940 It was the tooth of a mastodon, the same kind of animal whose bones had come out 450 00:32:39,940 --> 00:32:41,840 from under the lava in the humbug tunnel. 451 00:32:42,380 --> 00:32:47,620 On Thursday the 3rd of June, he exposed four glass plates by magnesium flash. 452 00:32:47,900 --> 00:32:51,140 For the flash, he had the pump stopped for ten minutes. 453 00:32:51,460 --> 00:32:54,060 His paragraph for that day ends like this. 454 00:32:54,340 --> 00:32:59,880 With the pump stopped there is a sound from the water, low and regular, one in 455 00:32:59,880 --> 00:33:01,340 every eight to ten seconds. 456 00:33:01,880 --> 00:33:08,500 source not found two years later the country went to war the men left steel 457 00:33:08,500 --> 00:33:13,880 went up and most of the mines in the county stood idle on saturday the twenty 458 00:33:13,880 --> 00:33:18,220 ninth of september nineteen seventeen the pumps of the drainage tunnel stopped 459 00:33:18,220 --> 00:33:23,220 the water came back a second time the fifth record lies outside this shaft 460 00:33:23,220 --> 00:33:29,560 what was found in the ridley has an echo in the same stone in other places that 461 00:33:29,560 --> 00:33:34,360 belt of pale limestone does not end at columbia it runs northwest across the 462 00:33:34,360 --> 00:33:40,280 stanislaus to vallecito and to murphy's at murphy's in september of eighteen 463 00:33:40,280 --> 00:33:45,400 eighty five a gold prospector named walter mercer found a crack among the 464 00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:50,300 rocks with cold air blowing out of it and went down on the floor of the cavern 465 00:33:50,300 --> 00:33:55,640 that carries his name to-day lay six human skeletons four adults a child and 466 00:33:55,640 --> 00:33:59,860 an infant and the skeletons lying in the lower chamber of the moaning cavern at 467 00:33:59,860 --> 00:34:05,300 Vallecito had been reported by the geologist John Trask as early as 1851. 468 00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:07,680 Now go back to Merriam's list. 469 00:34:07,980 --> 00:34:12,739 The caves of the giant made of rock, one at Murphy's, one on the Stanislaus 470 00:34:12,739 --> 00:34:17,440 River, the map kept by the Miwok, and the map made by the men who found 471 00:34:17,440 --> 00:34:21,179 caverns fall on the same belt of stone, at the same points. 472 00:34:21,630 --> 00:34:25,810 and of the bones in those caverns the miwok have gone on saying the same thing 473 00:34:25,810 --> 00:34:31,469 for a hundred years not ours we burn our dead the inside of the rock belongs to 474 00:34:31,469 --> 00:34:37,130 someone else the place fuller pointed to lies on that belt too the white rocks of 475 00:34:37,130 --> 00:34:41,530 columbia came to light in the eighteen fifties when miners washed away the soil 476 00:34:41,530 --> 00:34:46,670 that covered them pale rounded blocks standing up out of the ground in 477 00:34:46,670 --> 00:34:51,480 nineteen thirteen fuller called them the bones of a giant For the scale, one more 478 00:34:51,480 --> 00:34:55,020 comparison is needed, and this one comes from outside the continent. 479 00:34:55,639 --> 00:35:01,060 In Rome, beside the Colosseum, stands the Arch of Constantine, dedicated in 480 00:35:01,060 --> 00:35:02,200 the year 315. 481 00:35:02,820 --> 00:35:06,260 It is the largest Roman triumphal arch still standing. 482 00:35:06,680 --> 00:35:10,660 Its central passage was made for an emperor to go through with his chariot, 483 00:35:10,720 --> 00:35:17,560 his standards, and his procession, 37 feet 9 inches high, 21 feet 4 484 00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:18,560 inches wide. 485 00:35:18,780 --> 00:35:23,920 the archway at the bottom of the ridley shaft is two inches wider than that and 486 00:35:23,920 --> 00:35:29,080 two feet five inches higher rome built hers with the cranes and the thousands 487 00:35:29,080 --> 00:35:34,740 of hands of an empire in the open air in the middle of a public square the one 488 00:35:34,740 --> 00:35:39,000 under table mountain stands three hundred feet beneath a flow of lava ten 489 00:35:39,000 --> 00:35:45,240 million years old with not one trace to show how a crane a scaffold or so much 490 00:35:45,240 --> 00:35:49,820 as daylight was ever brought to it Colby looked for lampsoot on the walls of the 491 00:35:49,820 --> 00:35:53,380 passage and found none, but height is only half of it. 492 00:35:53,660 --> 00:35:56,100 There is a comparison for the plan as well. 493 00:35:56,500 --> 00:36:02,040 At Mycenae, in Greece, built into a hillside in the 13th century before 494 00:36:02,040 --> 00:36:06,700 Christ, stands the tomb, now called the Treasury of Atreus. 495 00:36:07,000 --> 00:36:12,940 It is reached by a passage 118 feet long, walled on both sides in dressed 496 00:36:12,940 --> 00:36:18,980 stone. at the end of the passage is a doorway close to eighteen feet high on 497 00:36:18,980 --> 00:36:23,540 either side of that doorway there once stood two half columns of green stone 498 00:36:23,540 --> 00:36:28,620 set against the wall the single lintel over the door weighs a hundred and 499 00:36:28,620 --> 00:36:34,540 twenty tons the plan is the same the scale is not and at mycen it is known 500 00:36:34,540 --> 00:36:40,340 what the building was it was a tomb and at tiryns some miles from mycen there 501 00:36:40,340 --> 00:36:44,940 are blocks ten feet long in the walls and the traveller pausanias passing that 502 00:36:44,940 --> 00:36:49,940 way in the second century wrote down what was said of them the cyclopes built 503 00:36:49,940 --> 00:36:54,920 these walls and a pair of mules could not move the smallest stone the greeks 504 00:36:54,920 --> 00:36:58,760 lived beside those walls and read the size of the builder from the size of the 505 00:36:58,760 --> 00:37:04,120 stone that is not what the miwok did the miwok had never seen the stone for the 506 00:37:04,120 --> 00:37:09,360 stone was under the lava they had only its name the sixth record and the last 507 00:37:09,850 --> 00:37:12,310 is not a file, it is the absence of one. 508 00:37:13,130 --> 00:37:16,350 Colby's survey book number three was the property of the company. 509 00:37:16,730 --> 00:37:21,670 When the mine shut down in 1900, it went with the other books to San Francisco, 510 00:37:21,910 --> 00:37:24,030 to the office on California Street. 511 00:37:24,430 --> 00:37:30,970 On the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April 1906, the city shook, and then for 512 00:37:30,970 --> 00:37:32,130 three days it burned. 513 00:37:32,410 --> 00:37:35,730 The office and all that was in it went to ash in those three days. 514 00:37:36,170 --> 00:37:37,990 What survives is not the book. 515 00:37:38,510 --> 00:37:42,930 in nineteen o four when the company was trying to sell the mine it had a clerk 516 00:37:42,930 --> 00:37:48,610 type out an abstract of the survey books thirty-one pages long the clerk carried 517 00:37:48,610 --> 00:37:53,670 over the figures and the sentences wherever colby had made a drawing the 518 00:37:53,670 --> 00:37:59,210 clerk typed one word in brackets sketch in the nine typed pages that deal with 519 00:37:59,210 --> 00:38:03,970 the archway that word appears twenty-three times the page on which an 520 00:38:03,970 --> 00:38:07,860 old man counted three rings with his finger no longer exists. 521 00:38:08,240 --> 00:38:12,200 There is only a pair of brackets to say that a drawing was once there. 522 00:38:12,660 --> 00:38:17,060 The clerk did not throw out the two pages for the 23rd of October, but 523 00:38:17,060 --> 00:38:20,880 because they were not survey matter, he moved them to the back under the heading 524 00:38:20,880 --> 00:38:27,180 Sundry. On the 16th of November, 1897, Colby wrote to the State Mining Bureau 525 00:38:27,180 --> 00:38:30,780 and asked that the archway be examined by a competent person. 526 00:38:31,200 --> 00:38:32,500 The letter was received. 527 00:38:32,970 --> 00:38:37,850 stamped and filed under the wrong county, not Tuolumne, but Calaveras. 528 00:38:38,130 --> 00:38:43,370 To a clerk at the Bureau, the place for strange things out of Table Mountain was 529 00:38:43,370 --> 00:38:44,510 the county of the skull. 530 00:38:44,810 --> 00:38:47,010 The reply was four lines long. 531 00:38:47,390 --> 00:38:51,670 The Bureau had no appropriation for underground examinations on private 532 00:38:51,670 --> 00:38:56,170 property. In the list of mines the Bureau printed in later years, the 533 00:38:56,170 --> 00:39:02,070 Ridley has a single line, Drift Mine, Shaft, 312 feet, Idle. 534 00:39:02,440 --> 00:39:03,379 in water. 535 00:39:03,380 --> 00:39:08,780 In 1908, William Sinclair of the University of California went once more 536 00:39:08,780 --> 00:39:13,700 through every find said to have come from under the lava, piece by piece, and 537 00:39:13,700 --> 00:39:14,700 closed the question. 538 00:39:15,220 --> 00:39:18,140 The Ridley is not in that study, and it could not have been. 539 00:39:18,380 --> 00:39:21,020 Not one line about it had ever been printed. 540 00:39:21,540 --> 00:39:23,180 Colby did not write of it again. 541 00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:29,080 He left the company in 1900, worked in the quartz mines of Amador County, and 542 00:39:29,080 --> 00:39:31,020 died at Stockton in 1924. 543 00:39:31,770 --> 00:39:36,230 in a letter of eighteen ninety nine to his sister in bath there is one sentence 544 00:39:36,230 --> 00:39:41,170 on the matter i have measured a door i cannot account for and i have been told 545 00:39:41,170 --> 00:39:46,390 to measure quartz holmes's single entry is in washington under the heading of 546 00:39:46,390 --> 00:39:52,670 caves fiske's report of twenty-two pages with its four glass plates was handed in 547 00:39:52,670 --> 00:39:57,090 to his company the company was wound up in nineteen nineteen by a lawyer in 548 00:39:57,090 --> 00:40:01,810 sonora and its papers stayed with him three of the plates are broken The one 549 00:40:01,810 --> 00:40:06,050 print taken from the fourth is fogged along one edge, and what it shows is the 550 00:40:06,050 --> 00:40:10,930 two lowest drums of a column, two rings, and a man standing with a carbide lamp 551 00:40:10,930 --> 00:40:14,030 in his hand, whose head does not come up to the first ring. 552 00:40:14,690 --> 00:40:18,430 And at Berkeley there is Gifford's Field Notebook of 1913. 553 00:40:18,910 --> 00:40:24,310 On the page facing the account of Yayali, in pencil, is a note that never 554 00:40:24,310 --> 00:40:25,310 went into print. 555 00:40:25,590 --> 00:40:29,830 Home of Yayali, under Table Mountain, shore's flat side. 556 00:40:30,430 --> 00:40:35,270 An old man listening gave a name for the place, where he bends his head, would 557 00:40:35,270 --> 00:40:36,270 say no more. 558 00:40:36,570 --> 00:40:41,790 The printed page says on the mountain, the notebook says under it. Between the 559 00:40:41,790 --> 00:40:43,310 two, one word changed. 560 00:40:43,810 --> 00:40:49,670 Five papers, in five buildings, under five headings, the mines of Tuolumne, 561 00:40:49,850 --> 00:40:55,250 the correspondence of Calaveras, the caves of California, the language of the 562 00:40:55,250 --> 00:40:58,470 Miwok, the affairs of a company that no longer exists. 563 00:40:59,290 --> 00:41:01,930 None of them was hidden, and none of them was destroyed. 564 00:41:02,230 --> 00:41:05,370 It is only that nobody ever laid the five on one table. 565 00:41:05,710 --> 00:41:09,530 There is a version of this story in which everything resolves into 566 00:41:09,530 --> 00:41:10,530 comfortable categories. 567 00:41:10,950 --> 00:41:15,310 It deserves to be given at its strongest, because some part of it is 568 00:41:15,310 --> 00:41:16,310 very likely true. 569 00:41:16,910 --> 00:41:22,530 1. The Stone The limestone of this belt is eaten by water, and is full of 570 00:41:22,530 --> 00:41:28,150 caverns. The one Mercer found, the one that moans at Vallecito, and hundreds 571 00:41:28,150 --> 00:41:33,300 more. marble parts along cracks that cross at right angles into square blocks 572 00:41:33,300 --> 00:41:37,880 that look like a laid wall men have been taking squared blocks out of this very 573 00:41:37,880 --> 00:41:42,720 belt since about eighteen fifty two and in eighteen fifty seven one block of 574 00:41:42,720 --> 00:41:47,140 columbia marble was dressed and sent east for the washington monument pale 575 00:41:47,140 --> 00:41:53,060 squared stone is no stranger to tuolumne county columns of dripstone banded ring 576 00:41:53,060 --> 00:41:56,080 above ring with their own growth can stand in pairs 577 00:41:56,780 --> 00:42:01,020 water can cut a polished shallow hollow in the under side of a rock none of that 578 00:42:01,020 --> 00:42:07,940 needs a hand two the eye one man saw all of it and he saw it by lantern light the 579 00:42:07,940 --> 00:42:13,180 second man was twenty-seven years old and down there on a column he met a line 580 00:42:13,180 --> 00:42:17,360 of pencil telling him what he was about to find three of his four plates are 581 00:42:17,360 --> 00:42:22,460 broken the one print that is left does not show a wall it shows two rings and a 582 00:42:22,460 --> 00:42:27,940 man as for the second archway in the water nobody ever touched it it was seen 583 00:42:27,940 --> 00:42:33,080 from fifty-six feet away by the light of a carbide lamp through the glass of an 584 00:42:33,080 --> 00:42:39,000 instrument and caverns repeat their shapes the three the paper the notebook 585 00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:43,560 itself is gone the abstract that survives was typed in nineteen o four 586 00:42:43,560 --> 00:42:49,200 for a company that was trying to sell an idle mine standing full of water a mine 587 00:42:49,200 --> 00:42:54,520 with a wonder at the bottom of it does not lose value in a buyer's eye for the 588 00:42:54,520 --> 00:42:59,900 gravel a hollow in limestone can fill with gravel from a sink-hole above it in 589 00:42:59,900 --> 00:43:04,640 any age at all the gravel brings the tooth along with it holmes's argument 590 00:43:04,640 --> 00:43:10,820 cuts both ways five the name the old man came to the collar of the shaft after 591 00:43:10,820 --> 00:43:15,420 the news had been travelling for nine days and it is colby himself who says so 592 00:43:15,420 --> 00:43:20,400 an account can grow quickly around a new thing the white rocks of columbia were 593 00:43:20,400 --> 00:43:24,610 uncovered by miners in the eighteen fifties and sixty years later they were 594 00:43:24,610 --> 00:43:28,630 the bones of a giant and the name in gifford's note-book was spoken in 595 00:43:28,630 --> 00:43:33,410 nineteen thirteen sixteen years after the ridley in the same town as the 596 00:43:33,410 --> 00:43:38,250 grandsons of those miners what survives besides is not the name but a 597 00:43:38,250 --> 00:43:42,210 translation of the name a place where the head is bent could as well be a low 598 00:43:42,210 --> 00:43:48,430 shelter of rock six the sound in the cavern at vallecito water dripping into 599 00:43:48,430 --> 00:43:53,090 hollows far below makes a moaning that gave the place its name and in limestone 600 00:43:53,090 --> 00:43:58,010 country there are springs known to run stop and run again by the clock as a 601 00:43:58,010 --> 00:44:03,250 siphon somewhere underground fills and empties and seven this is the next 602 00:44:03,250 --> 00:44:08,010 county over from the one that fooled a generation of science with a skull in 603 00:44:08,010 --> 00:44:12,990 this version nobody lies and nobody hides anything a company goes back to 604 00:44:12,990 --> 00:44:18,450 its pay gravel a bureau writes that it has no appropriation a curator notes the 605 00:44:18,450 --> 00:44:22,600 most reasonable guess about a thing he was not shown The file was not 606 00:44:22,600 --> 00:44:25,140 suppressed. It was simply not followed up. 607 00:44:25,580 --> 00:44:28,080 This version has things of its own to explain. 608 00:44:28,520 --> 00:44:31,940 An interval that comes out the same in eight courses out of eight. 609 00:44:32,160 --> 00:44:36,640 Rings that stand at the same level on two columns, one to every six and a half 610 00:44:36,640 --> 00:44:42,320 feet. Two heights, taken eighteen years apart by two men who never met, that 611 00:44:42,320 --> 00:44:46,760 differ by a quarter of an inch. And the second one, rising out of the water. 612 00:44:47,260 --> 00:44:49,880 The mountain is real. The lava is real. 613 00:44:50,220 --> 00:44:55,420 the dead river under it the mastodon of the humbug tunnel merriam's footnote and 614 00:44:55,420 --> 00:44:59,300 gifford's cylinders are real the unanswered questions begin only after 615 00:44:59,300 --> 00:45:05,180 that point that is not a weakness in the story it is the story the top of table 616 00:45:05,180 --> 00:45:10,160 mountain to-day is not very different from what colby saw black lava a skin of 617 00:45:10,160 --> 00:45:16,060 soil wild flowers for a week or two in march oaks along the edges half a mile 618 00:45:16,060 --> 00:45:20,660 west of shaw's flat out in the pasture There is a shallow dip in the ground 619 00:45:20,660 --> 00:45:22,380 with broken rock around its rim. 620 00:45:22,680 --> 00:45:24,640 That was the collar of the Ridley shaft. 621 00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:30,420 Its timbers were pulled after 1917, and in the twenties the shaft fell in on 622 00:45:30,420 --> 00:45:33,840 itself. From the county road there is nothing to see. 623 00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:39,900 No marker, no head frame, not one rusted piece of iron to say that a hoist ever 624 00:45:39,900 --> 00:45:45,140 turned here, a fence, a pasture, and black rock running dead level to the 625 00:45:45,140 --> 00:45:50,080 skyline. the mountain gives no sign that anything lies under it neither does the 626 00:45:50,080 --> 00:45:54,800 archive the two keep the same silence when the price of gold went to thirty 627 00:45:54,800 --> 00:45:59,360 five dollars an ounce in nineteen thirty four a good many of the old mines in the 628 00:45:59,360 --> 00:46:04,760 county opened again the ridley did not it was too wet on the eighth of october 629 00:46:04,760 --> 00:46:08,820 nineteen forty two in the middle of the war the federal government issued 630 00:46:08,820 --> 00:46:13,500 limitation order l two o eight which classed the gold mines of the country as 631 00:46:13,500 --> 00:46:18,550 non-essential and shut them down Most of the mines in the county never reopened. 632 00:46:18,830 --> 00:46:24,550 The 312 level has now been underwater for more than a hundred years, and the 633 00:46:24,550 --> 00:46:25,870 papers have not moved far. 634 00:46:26,070 --> 00:46:31,510 The typed abstract, Fisk's report, and his fogged print all lay in that 635 00:46:31,510 --> 00:46:38,010 lawyer's file cabinets in Sonora until 1958, when the office closed and they 636 00:46:38,010 --> 00:46:40,110 were given to the county's historical collection. 637 00:46:41,010 --> 00:46:45,250 Colby's letter went to Sacramento with the old records of the mining bureau, 638 00:46:45,720 --> 00:46:46,900 into the state archives. 639 00:46:47,420 --> 00:46:52,400 It is still in the Calaveras file, and at the foot of the ridge, just outside 640 00:46:52,400 --> 00:46:54,760 Jamestown, the Miwok are still living. 641 00:46:55,100 --> 00:46:59,820 In 1908, federal officials gave their land the name of the road that ran past 642 00:46:59,820 --> 00:47:01,080 it, Chicken Ranch. 643 00:47:01,480 --> 00:47:05,820 Two years later, to the east, the Tuolumne Rancheria was set aside. 644 00:47:06,240 --> 00:47:10,860 Both communities are there today, with their roundhouses, their language and 645 00:47:10,860 --> 00:47:11,860 their accounts. 646 00:47:12,040 --> 00:47:16,480 their traditional country in their own description of it runs from table 647 00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:22,000 mountain to the red hills no record shows that any institution from that day 648 00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:26,800 to this has asked them the name of the place under the mountain the name is on 649 00:47:26,800 --> 00:47:32,040 no map on the fourteenth of october eighteen ninety seven a shift boss tied 650 00:47:32,040 --> 00:47:37,220 a lantern to a line and let it down into a hole the lantern went down thirty-one 651 00:47:37,220 --> 00:47:42,500 feet and touched a pavement at the end of that pavement Forty feet up, the 652 00:47:42,500 --> 00:47:46,400 underside of a stone was worn like the head of a low cellar door. 653 00:47:46,740 --> 00:47:51,960 A surveyor laid his palm in that hollow. An old man, who had not seen it, said 654 00:47:51,960 --> 00:47:52,718 its name. 655 00:47:52,720 --> 00:47:54,520 The surveyor asked for stone. 656 00:47:54,800 --> 00:47:59,780 He was given timber. The timber held for eighteen years, and then a second man 657 00:47:59,780 --> 00:48:01,080 went through it with his shoulder. 658 00:48:01,480 --> 00:48:06,540 What closes that opening now is neither stone nor timber. It is water. 659 00:48:07,080 --> 00:48:08,940 A door does not stand by itself. 660 00:48:09,470 --> 00:48:14,290 it opens on to somewhere this one opens downward and below it in the water 661 00:48:14,290 --> 00:48:19,830 stands a second larger than the first so what is on the far side of the second 662 00:48:19,830 --> 00:48:25,170 door if the water under that mountain were ever drawn down how many more doors 663 00:48:25,170 --> 00:48:29,090 would there be to count why does the hollow under the keystone lie seven 664 00:48:29,090 --> 00:48:33,690 inches to the left and not in the middle and why did the old man ask for stone 665 00:48:33,690 --> 00:48:38,750 and not for wood to keep something out or to keep something in Tell us in the 666 00:48:38,750 --> 00:48:43,590 comments, if that telegram had come into your hands in 1897, would you have 667 00:48:43,590 --> 00:48:44,590 closed the opening?