Circles and fine lines down the spine

The surveyor's chain came up from the lower drift this morning with its brass discs still on it, one every ten fathoms, and Mr Pryce let me count them off on the cage while the men smoked at the head. There are nine left below us now, the last one no bigger than a shilling. He says the seam thins out past that and we won't be sent that far, though I've heard the same from every foreman since I was twelve.

Below the discs the shaft runs on as a plumb line, a single black thread hung from the bank with a lead weight at the foot. Ma would have said it looked like a stitch someone started and forgot. Each night I walk the line from the cage to the sump with a lamp and count the rings where the water has dried white on the timbers. The rings get smaller the deeper I go, the way a moon shrinks when you watch it sink down a well.

Pryce says the old men called the discs the planets, because when you hang a lamp at the top and look down, the brightest of them sit one above another like something hung in a sky. I told him it was a daft name for a hole in the ground. He laughed and said I'd think differently when the lamp went out and the discs were all we had to find our way up by.

Write when the carrier comes. Tell Tom his hens have laid again, and don't let him tell you I'm coming home at Christmas, because I haven't decided.

Love, Ed