I take the lantern, start down the ladder. At the bottom, hold up the lantern, look into the blackness stretching before me. The tunnel is small, a tight fit, and I have to half bow, half crouch in some places to get through. On either side is sandstone, big blocks of it, and every few paces there is a wooden frame supporting the roof. I keep going and going for what seem like a long time with no end in sight, until finally, up ahead, I see light pouring down a shaft from the outside. Suddenly I move faster and faster towards that opening, like a dog running to him food bowl. When I get there, I stand up straight gasping, looking up into the sunlight. A few minutes later, the big head and hat of the overseer come over, filling up the empty space, blocking out the light.

‘Well?’ the overseer say.

I don’t answer. Instead, I scramble up the ladder out into the fresh air.

‘Well, Buchanan?’ him say again.

I was moving so quick, I didn’t really take the time to look, but I think fast and say, ‘Look sturdy, sir. Strong. But, I notice …’

‘Yes?’

‘Some of the timber supports, is true they turn rotten in places. Look weak. Need a good bit of fixing. Some of the stone, cracked and crumbling.’

Now what I expect to hear is him going climb down into the shaft to take a look for himself, but him don’t.

Instead him say, ‘Buchanan, here is a map. We are here,’ pointing at it. ‘You go back down there and start marking the places where we need to add more support.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I say, taking the map. Maybe him afraid of tight, dark spaces too.

With that, him watch as I climb back down into the darkness.

Every day after that, James Smith and a group of convicts is kept back, marched over to the park, put to work on the bore with me in charge of how the repairs should go. It take a while, but I finally get used to working in dark, tight spaces. And although I still can’t read too many words, the one thing I can read is a map.

Sam Sharpe teach me, late one night when him asked me to stay back. He unrolled a map and started to explain how each one of the little marks and symbols is a message. A message that if you know how to, you can read, and the secrets in the message going be revealed. The squiggly line in blue is water. The brown circle is the rise of a hill. The green lines trees. If very thick, mean is a forest of trees. The line with upturned V is a cave. The area shaded in brown is barren land.