Original subtitles

in the autumn of eighteen ninety seven a crew driving adrift west from the bottom

of a gold shaft three hundred and twelve feet under table mountain in tuolumne

county cal struck a face of rock that rang hollow under the hammer rock does

not ring hollow what lay behind it was not a cave it was not a fissure beyond

the hole opened by one small charge ran a passage walled in pale gray stone with

a paved floor a lantern let down through the hole went thirty-one feet before it

touched at the end of that passage stood an archway two half columns thicker than

a man is tall each belted with three rings of stone and over them a single

keystone standing proud of the arch from the floor to the under side of that

keystone was forty feet two inches the miwok who had lived at the foot of that

mountain long before any miner already had a name for it forty feet is not a

door for a man seven men standing on one another's shoulders could not have

touched that keystone and a door is not built to be looked at it is built to be

gone through the company had the opening boarded shut twenty-two days later in

nineteen hundred the pumps were drawn and the drift went under water but a

mine surveyor's notebook one line pencilled beside a phonograph recording

sixteen years afterward and the measurements of a second man who went

down into the same dark eighteen years afterward all went on pointing at the

same door.

That is where this story begins.

Before we can understand the archway, we need to understand the mountain that

stands on top of it, because Table Mountain was not born a mountain.

It runs through Tuolumne County today as a narrow black ridge with a flat top,

winding for 18 miles from just west of the town of Columbia, down toward the

Stanislaus River.

Its level top is lava.

some ten million years ago lava that came out of the ground high in the

sierra nevada poured into the valley of the stanislaus of that day and ran down

it for more than eighty miles then it cooled over the millions of years that

followed the soft hills on either side of the valley wore away the lava did not

the river bed that had been the lowest ground in the country is now the highest

so under that ridge lies a dead river and in its gravel gold The miners worked

this out in the 1850s. By the end of 1857, more than 8,000 feet of tunnel had

been driven under the ridge.

The method was simple, and it was costly.

A tunnel in from the hillside, or a shaft straight down from the top through

the lava.

The miners called the lava basalt.

Under the basalt lay volcanic ash, under the ash lay the gravel of the river, and

at the very bottom of the gravel, resting on the bedrock, lay the thing

they had come for.

other things came out of those tunnels too in the humbug tunnel fifteen hundred

feet in from the mouth and under the lava men found the bones of a mastodon

stone mortars and pestles were said to have come out of others the state

geologist josiah whitney took those reports seriously and in eighteen eighty

in his great volume on the gold-bearing gravels of the sierra nevada he printed

every piece said to have come from under the lava each with the name of its

finder What became of those finds matters to this story, and we will come

back to it. They decided how the thing in the Ridley shaft would be received.

By 1897 the county was in its second age of gold.

The Sierra Railway had been incorporated that February, and its rails were coming

up from Oakdale, the last spike at Jamestown would be driven on the 10th of

November.

And at the foot of the ridge, in the oak country between Jamestown and Shores

Flat, lived the people who had been there before any of it, the Miwok. The

gold rush had gone straight through their villages.

In 1897 they were still there, cutting cordwood for the mine boilers, working

on the ranches, and gathering on winter nights in their round assembly houses to

hear the old accounts, a single one of which could take a whole night to tell.

One of those accounts concerned this ridge.

They are there today.

That autumn, half a mile west of Shaw's Flat.

On the flat top of the ridge there stood the collar of a shaft.

It was called the Ridley.

The first record is a notebook.

The man who kept it was named Asa Merritt Colby. He was born in March of

1858 in Bath, Maine.

His father was a ship-joiner in the yards there, and Colby learned as a boy

how two timbers are brought together so that a knife-blade will not go between

them. at twenty-one he came to california he carried chain on railroad

surveys then went underground and stayed there in eighteen ninety five the table

mountain deep channel company hired him as its engineer and surveyor the company

kept its office in san francisco and its mine was the ridley shaft in october of

eighteen ninety seven colby was thirty-nine years old and he stood five

feet eight inches those who have read his other surviving notebooks say the

same thing of all of them, Colby did not interpret.

A vein cut off where it should have run on, water he could not account for, a

compass needle that would not settle.

In every case he wrote down what he had measured and what he had seen, and left

the meaning to whoever opened the book after him. The man who wrote the pages

that follow was not known for his imagination.

The shaft had taken two years to sink.

On Colby's section sheet the figures stand in a column, 152 feet of basalt.

96 feet of ash and sand, 64 feet of gravel, 312 in all. At the bottom the

crew stood on bedrock and turned west, following the rim of the old river, and

there the bedrock changed.

The belt of pale, veined limestone that is quarried for marble at Columbia

passes under the ridge at exactly that place.

The notebook is headed Underground Survey Book, No. 3, the page for

Thursday, 14 October, 1897.

opens like any other day the shift the number of men the footage made then

comes one line face sounds hollow at two hundred and fourteen feet from shaft the

man who heard it first was a miner from columbia twenty-six years old named

daniel shea he told the shift boss giacomo ferretti and ferretti sent up

for colby colby came down took the hammer in his own hand and struck the

face in four places then they loaded a small charge when the dust had settled

there was a hole in the face a yard across and beyond the hole there was

nothing no far wall no roof no floor only a dark that gave the lantern

nothing back and cold unmoving air against their faces they tied a lantern

to a line and let it down ferretti paid the line out through his hands a fathom

at a time the lantern went down thirty-one feet and touched stone colby

looked over the edge of the hole and wrote the second line of that day floor

is paved at two in the afternoon they put him in an ore bucket and lowered him

on a hand windlass rigged in the drift he had with him a lantern a steel tape

and the notebook his feet touched and the rope went slack ferretti said

afterward that he looked at his watch twice that afternoon for eleven minutes

not one sound came up from below what colby saw in those eleven minutes is in

the book when the light first fell on it the wall looked to him like one piece an

unbroken face of pale stone running away in both directions only when he brought

the lantern close and moved it along the surface did the joints appear there were

level joints five feet nine inches apart and upright joints eleven feet six

inches apart the wall was not one piece it had been laid he took out his pocket

-knife and set the blade against a joint it would not enter he tried another and

it would not enter he tore a leaf from the notebook and tried the edge of the

paper and that would not enter either then he wrote down a word he had from

his father's shipyard a word that belongs to masons and joiners walls

dressed and fitted dressed means finished it means intended it says that

some one came here first with tools and with time and with a plan then he lifted

the lantern and walked west along the passage when he put the tape on it

afterward from end to end It came to one hundred and eighty-eight feet.

He did not see the archway at once.

His light reached first only two pale rounded masses going up on either hand,

and for a moment Colby took them for two walls running to the roof.

Then he raised the light and went on raising it. The light was not enough.

When at last he called up to the men at the hole, he said one thing.

He asked for another ladder.

Nobody told the company that day.

the superintendent of the mine orrin lathrop came down on the evening shift

looked a long time from the edge of the hole and gave the crew a single order

until san francisco answered what had been seen in this drift would stay in

this drift lathrop did not post his letter for four days by ferretti's later

account the delay had nothing to do with hiding it the men did not know how to

write down a thing for which their trade had no word colby knew he was a surveyor

that evening he did not write in the book what it was he wrote how high it

was the second record is the archway itself it fills fourteen pages of

colby's notebook and there is not one adjective of wonder on any of them he

measured the height twice the first time on friday the fifteenth of october he

set his transit on the floor of the passage ran a base line of sixty feet

back from the threshold and sighted on the lower edge of the keystone The

figure that came out of the angle was 40 feet 2 inches.

He did not trust it. He had the timbermen build a staging of mine

timbers inside the passage, and it took them three days to carry it to the crown

of the arch.

On Friday the 22nd, he climbed to the top plank, set the end of the steel tape

against the underside of the keystone, and dropped the other end to Ferretti on

the floor.

40 feet 2 inches.

The opening was 21 feet 6 inches wide.

The arch was a true half circle, and it sprang from the tops of the two columns,

twenty-nine feet five inches above the floor.

The columns were round shafts, sunk to half their thickness in the wall.

Each was seven feet four inches through.

Each stood on a plain base a foot high, and was built of four drums set one on

another, every drum six and a half feet tall.

at the three places where the drums met a flat ring of stone ran right around

the shaft sixteen inches high and standing out five inches three rings at

the same heights on both columns the lowest of them two feet above colby's

head at the top of each column sat a plain cap that widened upward in two

steps there was no ornament and no writing there was no carving no relief

no mark of any kind

The whole surface was, in Colby's words, smooth to the palm, and it carried none

of the marks a chisel or a pick would have left. The stone was the same pale

grey limestone as the walls of the passage, and fine bluish veins ran

through it. In every block the veins ran the same way.

Colby gave that a line to itself.

It was as though the whole archway had been cut from one quarry face, and the

stones set up again in the order they had lain in the rock.

the keystone was one piece it was a wedge nine feet four inches tall six

feet two inches across the top and four feet across the bottom and it stood

eleven inches forward of the arch stones on either side colby worked out its

volume and wrote its weight in the margin close to twenty tons twenty tons

of stone had been set forty feet above the floor and fitted between its two

neighbours so that a knife-blade would not go in But the strangest line in the

book is not about weight.

On top of the staging, Colby put his hand flat against the underside of the

keystone, and there, in the stone, he found a hollow.

It was three feet long and three quarters of an inch deep at the deepest,

and its edges were not sharp.

The inside of it was polished, brighter than any other part of the archway.

Colby's own comparison is this.

Like the curb of a well, or the head of a low cellar door, where heads and hands

have gone for generations and then one line more but this is forty feet from

the floor the same ware showed in one other place and that was the threshold

between the two columns lay a single stone the full width of the opening and

the middle of that stone was worn down into a shallow trough like a step on a

stair that has been climbed for a very long time of what lay beyond the archway

colby could write very little

The passage went on at the same width under a vaulted roof, and its floor fell

away, one foot down in every six.

Thirty-eight feet past the threshold the water began, clear, cold, and perfectly

still. By lantern light the paved floor could be seen going on down the slope

under the water, and then the light gave out.

colby tied his plumb bob to the end of the tape and let it run down the incline

sixty feet past the threshold the water was three feet eight inches deep and the

floor was still going down there his tape ended he could not measure where

the archway led only that it led down at the other end of the passage the east

end there was no archway there the walls and the paving simply broke off and

against the broken end packed to the roof stood the hardened river gravel

that the miners called cement colby drew that end as well and under the drawing

he wrote four words gravel lies against masonry to see what those four words

mean we have to look at how a find like this was met in california in eighteen

ninety seven it was not the first impossible thing to come out from under

table mountain and science had learned what to say to news of that kind it had

learned the hard way on the twenty fifth of february eighteen sixty six fifteen

miles northwest of the ridge at bald hill in calaveras county a human skull

was reported from a mine shaft a hundred and thirty feet down and under the lava

that summer whitney laid the skull before the california academy of

sciences and announced that man on this continent was older than the lava thirty

years later The claim fell.

The skull had come from an Indian burial ground nearby, and had been put down the

shaft as a storekeeper's joke.

The man who put the fall of all this on record was William Henry Holmes, head

curator of anthropology at the National Museum of the Smithsonian.

Holmes came out to California in 1898, and he did not only read papers, he went

into the old tunnels under Table Mountain himself.

he looked at the faces the mortars were said to have come from he went through

the waste dumps at the tunnel mouths he talked one by one with the mine

superintendents who were still living and he noted how their accounts had

shifted over the years the review he published in eighteen ninety nine is

hard and it is fair its conclusion is this Every object said to have come from

under the lava had either worked its way into the tunnels from the Indian

villages on the slopes above, or was one of the jokes that miners play on one

another and on visiting gentlemen.

That account is very probably correct, and for the Calavera's skull it is

certainly correct.

And yet Holmes was an honest man, and in his review he did not hide the one piece

he could not dispose of.

it was a pestle that the geologist clarence king had taken with his own

hands years before out of the gravel of table mountain and it lay by then in the

smithsonian's collection of that find holmes wrote that it may not be

challenged with impunity he looked for another way to account for it by his own

statement no definite result was reached on that same journey holmes heard of the

ridley shaft there is one entry in his notebook

Ridley Shaft, Table Mountain.

Company's surveyor reports a walled passage and an arch on the 312 level,

opening closed by order of the company. Not seen.

Probably a cavern in the marble. The columns.

Dripstone.

That, too, is a perfectly sensible reading. The limestone of this belt

really is full of caverns.

Marble does break into square blocks.

columns of dripstone do carry bands of growth ring above ring by lantern light

to an excited man all of that might pass for a wall and a pair of columns it does

not explain a joint that falls at five feet nine inches in every one of eight

courses it does not explain a floor paved crosswise it does not explain a

polished hollow forty feet above that floor and it does not explain the gravel

at all holmes's whole case rested on objects that had got into the gravel

afterward here the gravel had come afterward and lay against the object

holmes did not see the opening and in the review he published the ridley shaft

is not named but at the foot of that ridge there was a man who was not

surprised to hear that the door was there the third record does not begin on

paper it begins as a voice and it reaches paper only years later by other

hands the old accounts of the mewok were not written they were told in winter at

night in the round assembly house by the light of a small fire there were men who

made a calling of it going from village to village and telling in the assembly

house of each some of those accounts did reach paper years after the ridley shaft

through two different men both men are real and the work of both can be read in

a library to-day the first was the naturalist c hart merriam for twenty

years he sat with miwok elders along the foothills of the sierra and in nineteen

ten he published what he had been told his book describes a being spoken of by

the northern miwok of calaveras county a giant made of rock he carries a basket

of rock on his back he lives in caves and merriam sets down where one at

murphy's one on the stanislaus river he comes out only at night and because of

him the miwok never lay there dead in a cave merriam put a footnote to that

passage to suppose that the human bones found in the caves of these foothills

were placed there by the indians now living in the region is he wrote an

error the miwok burn there dead and look on the cave with horror if there are

bones they belong to some one who came before the second was a young museum man

from the university of california edward gifford in nineteen thirteen and

nineteen fourteen he came to tuolumne county with a phonograph recorded the

accounts in the miwok language on wax cylinders and translated them sentence

by sentence of the fourteen he printed eleven were told by one man who lived at

jamestown his name was thomas williams and he had once been one of those

travelling tellers One of the accounts Williams gave is called Yayali.

Yayali is a giant who comes up the mountain from below, shouting, with a

basket on his back, and his voice carries over the hills.

Against the doors of the house he enters, and against its smoke-hole, he

rolls boulders, so that those inside cannot get out.

He is so tall that when he dances in the assembly house, his head goes out

through the smoke-hole.

At the end of the account a woman runs to the house of her father.

Her father spits on the door. The door is a great rock. The house, and

everything around it, turns to stone.

Under that account, Gifford printed a note one line long.

Yayali's home was on Table Mountain near Jamestown.

A second teller, William Fuller of Soulsbyville, gives the death of the

same giant, and he points to a place.

The white rocks near Columbia are his bleached bones. The white rocks near

Columbia are real. They are that pale, veined limestone.

none of this was in print in october of eighteen ninety seven merriam's book lay

thirteen years ahead gifford's cylinders sixteen no miner at the head of the

ridley shaft could have read any of it on a page but the accounts were there

they were at the foot of the ridge and on saturday the twenty third of october

eighteen ninety seven one of them walked up to the collar of the shaft

colby's entry for that day runs to two pages and it is the only entry in the

book with no measurement in it the hoist boiler at the shaft burned wood and the

wood was cut and hauled from the oak flats at the foot of the ridge by a crew

of mewok men from the village toward jamestown at the head of that crew was

an old man colby did not write his name he calls him only the wood contractor

that saturday when his wagon had been unloaded the old man did not leave He

stood on the flat lava beside the collar of the shaft and waited for Colby.

In spite of Lathrop's order, the news had taken nine days to get out. The old

man asked nothing.

His English was the English of a man who has learned a language after forty, slow

and complete.

He told Colby what the old people said about this ridge.

They said the top used to be the bottom.

They said he lives under the mountain, not on it.

he comes there from below and he calls as he comes they said that under the

mountain on the shore's flat side there is a place and that the place has a name

the old man gave the name first in his own language colby could not write it

then he gave it in english and colby set it down between quotation marks where he

bends his head they said the dead are not put inside the rock the inside of

the rock belongs to some one else they said that place is not entered from the

side colby asked what that meant the old man lifted his hand toward the east

toward the side where the dead river lies under the ridge his door is on that

side he said you came in by the side that evening colby put a note against

the first of those sayings every miner in this county knows the top was once

the bottom and the man has cut wood for the mines for thirty years against the

other sayings he put no note colby showed him the drawing the archway the

two columns the rings the old man looked at the page for a long time he counted

the rings with his finger three of them and he nodded then he gave the page back

and when he was asked whether he would go down and see it he said no it is not

a thing to look at twice he said before he left he asked for one thing and colby

wrote it word for word when you close it close it with stone not with wood At the

foot of those two pages, Colby added one sentence of his own. He had not spoken

of the hollow under the keystone to anyone above ground.

No one knew of it but Ferretti, and the old man had not asked about the hollow.

He had no need to. He had given its name.

Here, at the collar of a shaft, the two records come to stand side by side.

One is a surveyor's notebook.

It was written on Friday the 22nd of October, and it says this.

forty feet two inches above the floor on the under side of the keystone there is

a shallow hollow polished like the head of a doorway where heads have gone for

generations the other is a name it was spoken the next day by a man who had

never been underground and had never been told of the hollow and his people

had been using it since long before the first pick was put into this ridge where

he bends his head and there is a second pair the note-book says that the east

end of the passage is broken off and that the broken end is packed to the

roof with the gravel of the old river which is to say that the place this

passage once opened on to is the valley now lying under the lava the old man

never went down and he never saw that end in the drawing he lifted his hand

toward the east his door is on that side a note-book can be shelved under the

wrong county and it can burn A name cannot be put on the wrong shelf while

there is a living person to say it.

Colby did not sleep that night.

At one o'clock on Sunday morning, the one night of the week with no shift

below, he went down the shaft alone.

He did not write why.

He wrote what he did.

He walked the drift, and climbed down the thirty-one feet of rope ladder that

had been hung in the hole that week.

he walked the passage to its west end with one lantern his own footsteps

coming back to him off eight courses of stone and climbed the staging on the top

plank he stood upright and set the lantern down at his feet then he lifted

his hand and laid his palm in the hollow the stone was cold and in the word he

used as slick as a stair-rail colby stood there with his head two feet under

the keystone and thirty-two feet of empty air below his boots he knew his

own height and he knew now the height of the opening he was standing in.

And he saw and wrote down something he had missed by day.

The hollow was not in the middle of the keystone.

It lay seven inches to the south, toward the left-hand column, like a man who

goes through every doorway with the same shoulder first.

Colby wrote that sentence, and then ruled a single line through it.

It can still be read under the line.

It was then that he heard the sound.

It came from beyond the archway.

from the water at the foot of the incline it was low and it was regular to

describe it colby used the one comparison his trade gave him like a man

calling from the bottom of a shaft he came down off the staging crossed the

threshold and walked down the incline to the edge of the water he took out his

watch the sound came once in every nine seconds and it neither quickened nor

slowed the flame of his lantern in a place with no wind at all leaned a

little inward through the archway and out at the limit of the light the water

he had seen every day as still as glass was moving slow wide rings coming out of

the dark toward the threshold the old man had said it the day before he calls

as he comes there may be an explanation and it will have its turn that night

colby did not write what he thought he wrote what he heard and beside it the

one thing he could measure which was time sound from the incline low regular

stayed one hour it did not come nearer what that line means the notebook does

not say the old man did not say neither will we nine days later san francisco

answered the company's answer came on tuesday the second of november eighteen

ninety seven as a telegram it was ten words long resume west lead close the

opening no visitors letter follows

no letter ever followed the opening was closed three days later on friday the

fifth two sets of mine timber with heavy planking spiked across them from wall to

wall colby had asked for lime mortar and two days of labour to build a wall of

stone lathrop refused the rails would be in jamestown in five days and that week

the company wanted every man it had on pay gravel the last entry in the book

about the archway is two sentences long closed with timber I asked for stone.

The west lead was followed for two more years, then it pinched and was gone.

On Monday, the 12th of March, 1900, the pumps were drawn, the water came back,

at its own pace, to the 312 level.

The fourth record is a second man, who went down into the same dark 18 years

later, and that man had never heard the name of Asa Colby.

In January of 1915, a new company, which had been quietly buying up ground along

the ridge for years, announced that it was driving a tunnel a mile long to

drain the water from under Table Mountain.

As the tunnel went forward, the water in the old workings went down.

The Ridley shaft was re-timbered to give the new tunnel air.

The job was handed to the company's assistant engineer, Leland Hartwell

Fisk, born in Sacramento in 1888.

a mining engineer out of stanford in nineteen eleven and twenty-seven years

old on tuesday the eighteenth of may nineteen fifteen fisk went into the west

drift to see what state the old levels were in at two hundred and fourteen feet

he came up against a bulkhead of timber according to his report after fifteen

years under water it had the firmness of wet bread he put his shoulder to it and

went through through the hole behind it he let down his carbide lamp on a cord

thirty-one feet fiske spent the next sixteen days in that passage and without

knowing that colby had ever lived he did again everything colby had done the

length of the passage by steel tape one hundred and eighty-eight feet three

inches the courses of stone five feet nine inches eight of them the inside

height of the archway by transit forty feet one and three quarter inches

between the figures of two men who never met taken eighteen years apart the

difference is one quarter of an inch then he understood that some one had

been there before him inside the passage in front of the archway stood a staging

of timber black and slimed over but still upright and on the lowest drum of

the south column at the height of a man's eye there was a line of pencil a m

c october twenty second ninety seven forty feet two inches fiske went looking

for the owner of those initials the man who could give him the name was a

retired shift boss living in columbia sixty-two years old giacomo ferretti and

ferretti did not know where colby had gone the eleven minutes of silence the

two looks at the watch and the reason the letter was four days late are all

known to-day from what ferretti told fiske that summer Fisk did not climb the

old staging, because he did not trust it, but he saw something Colby could not

have seen, because the water was no longer where Colby had left it.

In 1897, the water began 38 feet past the threshold.

In 1915, with the drainage tunnel running, it began 104 feet past it,

which is to say it had dropped 11 feet.

fiske walked those hundred and four feet at that point the vault ended the walls

fell back on either side and the light of his carbide lamp went out into

something that was not a passage it was a hall out of the water fifty-six feet

beyond rose a second archway the same pale stone the same half-circle the same

keystone standing proud the same round columns on either hand, except that on

these, above the line of the water, there were not three rings to count but

four. Fisk set his transit at the water's edge.

Between the columns it was thirty-one feet six inches.

The underside of the keystone was forty-four feet above the surface of the

water, and by his reckoning from the slope, the threshold of that archway lay

under nine feet of water.

The first door was forty feet, the second was fifty-three.

fiske went to the east end as well the place where colby had written that the

gravel lies against the masonry there he did the one thing colby had not done he

tried with his hammer to part the gravel from the wall it would not part the

gravel was bonded to the faces of the broken blocks as if it had been welded

there and it had filled the very gaps between them two feet out from the

broken wall he worked a tooth out of that hardened gravel the size of a fist

with rounded humps along its crown.

It was the tooth of a mastodon, the same kind of animal whose bones had come out

from under the lava in the humbug tunnel.

On Thursday the 3rd of June, he exposed four glass plates by magnesium flash.

For the flash, he had the pump stopped for ten minutes.

His paragraph for that day ends like this.

With the pump stopped there is a sound from the water, low and regular, one in

every eight to ten seconds.

source not found two years later the country went to war the men left steel

went up and most of the mines in the county stood idle on saturday the twenty

ninth of september nineteen seventeen the pumps of the drainage tunnel stopped

the water came back a second time the fifth record lies outside this shaft

what was found in the ridley has an echo in the same stone in other places that

belt of pale limestone does not end at columbia it runs northwest across the

stanislaus to vallecito and to murphy's at murphy's in september of eighteen

eighty five a gold prospector named walter mercer found a crack among the

rocks with cold air blowing out of it and went down on the floor of the cavern

that carries his name to-day lay six human skeletons four adults a child and

an infant and the skeletons lying in the lower chamber of the moaning cavern at

Vallecito had been reported by the geologist John Trask as early as 1851.

Now go back to Merriam's list.

The caves of the giant made of rock, one at Murphy's, one on the Stanislaus

River, the map kept by the Miwok, and the map made by the men who found

caverns fall on the same belt of stone, at the same points.

and of the bones in those caverns the miwok have gone on saying the same thing

for a hundred years not ours we burn our dead the inside of the rock belongs to

someone else the place fuller pointed to lies on that belt too the white rocks of

columbia came to light in the eighteen fifties when miners washed away the soil

that covered them pale rounded blocks standing up out of the ground in

nineteen thirteen fuller called them the bones of a giant For the scale, one more

comparison is needed, and this one comes from outside the continent.

In Rome, beside the Colosseum, stands the Arch of Constantine, dedicated in

the year 315.

It is the largest Roman triumphal arch still standing.

Its central passage was made for an emperor to go through with his chariot,

his standards, and his procession, 37 feet 9 inches high, 21 feet 4

inches wide.

the archway at the bottom of the ridley shaft is two inches wider than that and

two feet five inches higher rome built hers with the cranes and the thousands

of hands of an empire in the open air in the middle of a public square the one

under table mountain stands three hundred feet beneath a flow of lava ten

million years old with not one trace to show how a crane a scaffold or so much

as daylight was ever brought to it Colby looked for lampsoot on the walls of the

passage and found none, but height is only half of it.

There is a comparison for the plan as well.

At Mycenae, in Greece, built into a hillside in the 13th century before

Christ, stands the tomb, now called the Treasury of Atreus.

It is reached by a passage 118 feet long, walled on both sides in dressed

stone. at the end of the passage is a doorway close to eighteen feet high on

either side of that doorway there once stood two half columns of green stone

set against the wall the single lintel over the door weighs a hundred and

twenty tons the plan is the same the scale is not and at mycen it is known

what the building was it was a tomb and at tiryns some miles from mycen there

are blocks ten feet long in the walls and the traveller pausanias passing that

way in the second century wrote down what was said of them the cyclopes built

these walls and a pair of mules could not move the smallest stone the greeks

lived beside those walls and read the size of the builder from the size of the

stone that is not what the miwok did the miwok had never seen the stone for the

stone was under the lava they had only its name the sixth record and the last

is not a file, it is the absence of one.

Colby's survey book number three was the property of the company.

When the mine shut down in 1900, it went with the other books to San Francisco,

to the office on California Street.

On the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April 1906, the city shook, and then for

three days it burned.

The office and all that was in it went to ash in those three days.

What survives is not the book.

in nineteen o four when the company was trying to sell the mine it had a clerk

type out an abstract of the survey books thirty-one pages long the clerk carried

over the figures and the sentences wherever colby had made a drawing the

clerk typed one word in brackets sketch in the nine typed pages that deal with

the archway that word appears twenty-three times the page on which an

old man counted three rings with his finger no longer exists.

There is only a pair of brackets to say that a drawing was once there.

The clerk did not throw out the two pages for the 23rd of October, but

because they were not survey matter, he moved them to the back under the heading

Sundry. On the 16th of November, 1897, Colby wrote to the State Mining Bureau

and asked that the archway be examined by a competent person.

The letter was received.

stamped and filed under the wrong county, not Tuolumne, but Calaveras.

To a clerk at the Bureau, the place for strange things out of Table Mountain was

the county of the skull.

The reply was four lines long.

The Bureau had no appropriation for underground examinations on private

property. In the list of mines the Bureau printed in later years, the

Ridley has a single line, Drift Mine, Shaft, 312 feet, Idle.

in water.

In 1908, William Sinclair of the University of California went once more

through every find said to have come from under the lava, piece by piece, and

closed the question.

The Ridley is not in that study, and it could not have been.

Not one line about it had ever been printed.

Colby did not write of it again.

He left the company in 1900, worked in the quartz mines of Amador County, and

died at Stockton in 1924.

in a letter of eighteen ninety nine to his sister in bath there is one sentence

on the matter i have measured a door i cannot account for and i have been told

to measure quartz holmes's single entry is in washington under the heading of

caves fiske's report of twenty-two pages with its four glass plates was handed in

to his company the company was wound up in nineteen nineteen by a lawyer in

sonora and its papers stayed with him three of the plates are broken The one

print taken from the fourth is fogged along one edge, and what it shows is the

two lowest drums of a column, two rings, and a man standing with a carbide lamp

in his hand, whose head does not come up to the first ring.

And at Berkeley there is Gifford's Field Notebook of 1913.

On the page facing the account of Yayali, in pencil, is a note that never

went into print.

Home of Yayali, under Table Mountain, shore's flat side.

An old man listening gave a name for the place, where he bends his head, would

say no more.

The printed page says on the mountain, the notebook says under it. Between the

two, one word changed.

Five papers, in five buildings, under five headings, the mines of Tuolumne,

the correspondence of Calaveras, the caves of California, the language of the

Miwok, the affairs of a company that no longer exists.

None of them was hidden, and none of them was destroyed.

It is only that nobody ever laid the five on one table.

There is a version of this story in which everything resolves into

comfortable categories.

It deserves to be given at its strongest, because some part of it is

very likely true.

1. The Stone The limestone of this belt is eaten by water, and is full of

caverns. The one Mercer found, the one that moans at Vallecito, and hundreds

more. marble parts along cracks that cross at right angles into square blocks

that look like a laid wall men have been taking squared blocks out of this very

belt since about eighteen fifty two and in eighteen fifty seven one block of

columbia marble was dressed and sent east for the washington monument pale

squared stone is no stranger to tuolumne county columns of dripstone banded ring

above ring with their own growth can stand in pairs

water can cut a polished shallow hollow in the under side of a rock none of that

needs a hand two the eye one man saw all of it and he saw it by lantern light the

second man was twenty-seven years old and down there on a column he met a line

of pencil telling him what he was about to find three of his four plates are

broken the one print that is left does not show a wall it shows two rings and a

man as for the second archway in the water nobody ever touched it it was seen

from fifty-six feet away by the light of a carbide lamp through the glass of an

instrument and caverns repeat their shapes the three the paper the notebook

itself is gone the abstract that survives was typed in nineteen o four

for a company that was trying to sell an idle mine standing full of water a mine

with a wonder at the bottom of it does not lose value in a buyer's eye for the

gravel a hollow in limestone can fill with gravel from a sink-hole above it in

any age at all the gravel brings the tooth along with it holmes's argument

cuts both ways five the name the old man came to the collar of the shaft after

the news had been travelling for nine days and it is colby himself who says so

an account can grow quickly around a new thing the white rocks of columbia were

uncovered by miners in the eighteen fifties and sixty years later they were

the bones of a giant and the name in gifford's note-book was spoken in

nineteen thirteen sixteen years after the ridley in the same town as the

grandsons of those miners what survives besides is not the name but a

translation of the name a place where the head is bent could as well be a low

shelter of rock six the sound in the cavern at vallecito water dripping into

hollows far below makes a moaning that gave the place its name and in limestone

country there are springs known to run stop and run again by the clock as a

siphon somewhere underground fills and empties and seven this is the next

county over from the one that fooled a generation of science with a skull in

this version nobody lies and nobody hides anything a company goes back to

its pay gravel a bureau writes that it has no appropriation a curator notes the

most reasonable guess about a thing he was not shown The file was not

suppressed. It was simply not followed up.

This version has things of its own to explain.

An interval that comes out the same in eight courses out of eight.

Rings that stand at the same level on two columns, one to every six and a half

feet. Two heights, taken eighteen years apart by two men who never met, that

differ by a quarter of an inch. And the second one, rising out of the water.

The mountain is real. The lava is real.

the dead river under it the mastodon of the humbug tunnel merriam's footnote and

gifford's cylinders are real the unanswered questions begin only after

that point that is not a weakness in the story it is the story the top of table

mountain to-day is not very different from what colby saw black lava a skin of

soil wild flowers for a week or two in march oaks along the edges half a mile

west of shaw's flat out in the pasture There is a shallow dip in the ground

with broken rock around its rim.

That was the collar of the Ridley shaft.

Its timbers were pulled after 1917, and in the twenties the shaft fell in on

itself. From the county road there is nothing to see.

No marker, no head frame, not one rusted piece of iron to say that a hoist ever

turned here, a fence, a pasture, and black rock running dead level to the

skyline. the mountain gives no sign that anything lies under it neither does the

archive the two keep the same silence when the price of gold went to thirty

five dollars an ounce in nineteen thirty four a good many of the old mines in the

county opened again the ridley did not it was too wet on the eighth of october

nineteen forty two in the middle of the war the federal government issued

limitation order l two o eight which classed the gold mines of the country as

non-essential and shut them down Most of the mines in the county never reopened.

The 312 level has now been underwater for more than a hundred years, and the

papers have not moved far.

The typed abstract, Fisk's report, and his fogged print all lay in that

lawyer's file cabinets in Sonora until 1958, when the office closed and they

were given to the county's historical collection.

Colby's letter went to Sacramento with the old records of the mining bureau,

into the state archives.

It is still in the Calaveras file, and at the foot of the ridge, just outside

Jamestown, the Miwok are still living.

In 1908, federal officials gave their land the name of the road that ran past

it, Chicken Ranch.

Two years later, to the east, the Tuolumne Rancheria was set aside.

Both communities are there today, with their roundhouses, their language and

their accounts.

their traditional country in their own description of it runs from table

mountain to the red hills no record shows that any institution from that day

to this has asked them the name of the place under the mountain the name is on

no map on the fourteenth of october eighteen ninety seven a shift boss tied

a lantern to a line and let it down into a hole the lantern went down thirty-one

feet and touched a pavement at the end of that pavement Forty feet up, the

underside of a stone was worn like the head of a low cellar door.

A surveyor laid his palm in that hollow. An old man, who had not seen it, said

its name.

The surveyor asked for stone.

He was given timber. The timber held for eighteen years, and then a second man

went through it with his shoulder.

What closes that opening now is neither stone nor timber. It is water.

A door does not stand by itself.

it opens on to somewhere this one opens downward and below it in the water

stands a second larger than the first so what is on the far side of the second

door if the water under that mountain were ever drawn down how many more doors

would there be to count why does the hollow under the keystone lie seven

inches to the left and not in the middle and why did the old man ask for stone

and not for wood to keep something out or to keep something in Tell us in the

comments, if that telegram had come into your hands in 1897, would you have

closed the opening?