Cover

Dedication

To my boys, who will one day conquer the world

Epigraph

‘Come little leaves,’ said the wind one day.

‘Come over the meadows with me and play.

Put on your dresses of red and gold.

For summer is gone and the days grow cold.’

George Cooper

Prologue

Prologue

29 August 1990

The water began its journey in the darkness somewhere deep inside the ridge. It flowed from an underground spring with such force that it was pushed upwards, driving metre after metre through rock, mud and sediment. The ridge was over two hundred metres high, and without human assistance the water would have eventually lost its momentum, turned downwards, found its way out between the roots of the deciduous trees that covered the slopes and ended up as a stream in one of the steep ravines that sliced through the sides of the ridge. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a quarry was opened up high on the ridge. Diabase and amphibolite – hard, black varieties of rock well suited for gravestones.

The workers blasted and excavated eagerly, deeper and deeper, until the day the shaft crossed the path of the water, providing it with an easier route to the surface. And the water thanked them by gushing forth with a power no one could have imagined. Only six months later the pumps were shut down, the machinery was taken away and the quarry was abandoned.

As time went by, the place was all but forgotten. The water transformed the quarry into a small, deep pool, surrounded on three sides by steep, dark cliffs, and on the fourth by a sloping bank. The forest swallowed up the access road and the undergrowth reclaimed the area until all that remained were a few overgrown ruins of former workmen’s huts, and a glade right next to the bank where the shards of rock were packed so tightly that no living thing could fight its way through.

The quarry wasn’t rediscovered until the ’60s, when the logging machines required new routes. In spite of the fact that no one was allowed on site, the beautiful, hidden pool became a favourite place for the young people in the area to swim and sunbathe. It was a perfect spot to meet and do whatever they wanted, without the feeling of constantly being monitored. By that stage no one had any idea how deep the quarry was. Some claimed that the water must be at least twenty metres deep, others forty. Some even said the quarry was bottomless, although how that was possible was a complete mystery.