Cross Cut

His voice echoed dully, swallowed by the rough- ribbed, deep striations of the tunnel walls that looked as though they had been lacerated by giant claws. But for the pools of light shed by the two lamps, the darkness inside the tunnel would have been complete. The air was heavy, still, and fetid with a heady witch's brew of ill defined chemical smells.Advancing into the bowels of the mine they sloshed through puddles of water. The yellow light of their carbide lamps, dancing over the slick corrugations of the adit walls, threw up coatings of green bacterial slime and here and there small, iridescent, green copper stalactites and spikes of the same plumage jutting from the tunnel wall.