4/ A Pillar of Light
For anyone who wasn't there at the start of this story, here it is in short. In the middle of the Blind Passage it is dark, and nothing must burn in there. So the children brought in light from outside, borrowed light: with Mr Pearson's sign, a piece of metal from an old bucket and a white board that had once been a henhouse door.
Then the whole little town started talking about the passage, and everyone remembered it differently. Granny Dora remembered light, Mr Jacobs the bell-ringer water, Mrs Rowan a man with a bucket, and Mr Sparrow the baker only darkness. Luna understood that nobody was lying. It was one story of the same passage, only from different times. Light and water had once come into the passage through the same hole. But where it was, the children didn't know.
At midday the next day, Luna stayed behind alone in the middle of the passage, looking at the walls.
And on the wall she found scratches. They began low down, about as high as her knees, and from there they climbed one above another, until they reached a little way above her head.
They had been there since ancient times. It was just that for a very long while there had been nobody to see them. They were short marks carved into the stone, one above the other, spaced unevenly, and beside some of them there were tiny, very old letters.
You couldn't read them at a glance. Someone had written them long ago, in the language people spoke then, and had shortened the words the way you do when you are writing for yourself and never imagine that anybody will read it one day.
Luna sat over them for three days. She came back around midday, when the light from the white board fell on the wall. Beside the tiny letters, Spark shone for her. Then Luna went outside and wrote down whatever she had managed to make out.
Beside one mark there was something about the first snow. Beside another, something about the lambs. Beside one right at the bottom there were three letters, which Luna finally decided meant the longest day.
And beside the last mark, a name had been scratched. Not a famous name. An ordinary name, the kind people have. Luna read it, did not say it out loud, and never wrote it down anywhere.
"They had a calendar here," she told George. "The patch of light crept along the wall for them. Wherever it was standing, they knew what time of year it was."
"And those words aren't about what happened," she added. "They're about what's coming. When the light reached this mark, the lambs were on their way. When it reached that one, the first snow was on its way. They weren't writing down here what had happened. They were writing down what to get ready for."
And then she said the rest of it, all the way to the end, because that was the part that mattered.
"The patch of light moved because the sun moved. The hole didn't move. The hole is still exactly where it always was."
2. An Angle Can Be Brought In from Outside
At first they didn't know what to do with it. A mark said where the light had landed at this time of year. The hole was somewhere up in the slab. And between those two places there was nothing to take hold of.
Then George saw it, the way he sees things. Very directly.
"The light went from the hole to that mark," he said. "Straight. So if we knew how steeply it slanted, we'd know where the hole is."
"You can measure how steeply the sunlight comes down," said Luna. "Just not in here. The sun doesn't shine in here."
"Then we'll measure it outside and bring it in."
And that was it. An angle can be brought in from outside, just as the light had been brought in before.
George built it in a single afternoon, and it was the simplest thing he had ever built.
First Luna stuck a stick into the ground in the square and, at midday, measured its shadow. From the stick and its shadow, George cut a wooden triangle out of a board: one side as tall as the stick, one as long as the shadow. Its sloping edge was tilted exactly as steeply as the sun had stood that day.
Then they took a piece of string. George held one end against the mark on the wall that they thought belonged to this time of year. Luna stretched the string upwards, along the triangle, so that it had the very same slope.
The string touched the stone slab above their heads.
They repeated the measuring the next day, because George no longer tries things only once. It came out the same. They marked the spot on the slab with whitewash on the end of a long pole.
It was a white smudge the size of a palm, and there was nothing special about it.
Nobody goes up onto the slab. Seen from above, it isn't a ceiling at all, only an ordinary bit of hillside — a flat stone overgrown with grass, lying in the slope as slanted as everything around it. Standing on it, you would never guess that there is a passage underneath.
Getting onto it is easy. A little above the top end of the passage, you turn off the path and walk down over the grass onto its back.
It's just that nobody goes there. Anyone going up goes through the passage, and there is nothing to do on the stone.
When they got there and found the same spot from above, they saw that the grass grew differently. In one strip, about as long as a bench, it was paler and thinner, the way grass grows on earth that doesn't belong there.
They had marked a palm's width. They had found a bench's length.
3. That Hole Is Mine
And that was when Mr Shelley came.
He came up over the grass with his hat in his hand and his hands folded. He stood there without saying anything for a moment, the way a person stands who is apologising in advance for something.
"I know you mean well," he said. "But I would leave that slab alone."
And he told them why. He said it slowly, and without a single unkind word. That slab had been lying there since before there were even people in the valley. Nobody knows what is leaning on what. If you pull one stone out of it, you can't know which other stone will come loose.
"Once you take a roof apart, you never put it back."
And it sounded sensible. Everyone in Betweenhills would have agreed with him — not out of fear, but because they were fond of Mr Shelley, and because a roof is a roof.
George lost his temper for the second time. "You don't know anything about that slab!"
Spark shrank to a single hair of light.
Luna noticed something then, even though she stumbled over a stone as she turned. Mr Shelley was not looking at them. He was looking at the ground under his feet, at that strip of pale grass.
And he was looking at it as at something he had already seen once before.
The next morning he was sitting on the bench under the shelter, waiting for them.
He talked for a long time, and nobody interrupted him.
When he was fifteen, he carried things through the Blind Passage. Every day up and every day down, because at home money had to be earned. And in the middle of the passage, water dripped on his neck and on whatever he was carrying. In summer, that didn't matter. In winter, it was bad.
So one autumn he climbed up onto the slab from above, and there he found a crack as long as a bench and so wide that a person could have fallen into it. He plugged it with stones and earth. It took him a week, and he carried the earth up from the stream in a bucket, because up there there was none.
He told nobody. At first because nobody asked him. Later because a year had already gone by.
And then he was seventeen, and he left the valley. He came back only on that Tuesday, when he drove a cartload of boxes into the square. By then, people had grown up in the little town who had never seen him, and Mr Sparrow the baker had been born in the meantime into a passage where nothing shone any more.
In all that time, nobody had linked that crack with the person who had plugged it. The only one who knew about it was far away.
And when a thing is that old, a person no longer knows how to begin telling it.
"You're looking for a hole," he said at last. "That hole is mine."
If you've just thought that he could have said this long ago, you're right. But try to imagine how a thing like that is said once it has grown old. Every year it gets a little harder to say, and a person always finds a reason to say it tomorrow. Mr Shelley said it. It took him a long time, but he said it himself, and nobody had begged him to. That is not a small thing.
And then he said one more thing, which turned everything around.
"And that is exactly why you must not be the ones to dig there. I know what I put in there, and in what order. Under that earth there is one flat stone, and it holds up all the rest. Whoever pulls it out first will feel everything give way under their hands, along the whole length. And whoever is kneeling on it goes down with it."
He had been defending the slab because he knew about it. Not because he wanted to cover something up. Whoever covered something up is usually the only one who knows how to uncover it.
4. A Pillar of Light
They opened up the crack on Sunday, around midday, and the whole little town was there, even though you couldn't watch from down below and up on top there was hardly any room.
Mr Shelley knelt down on the slab. He put his hat beside him in the grass. He unfolded his hands, which he had kept folded all his life.
He dug with his fingers. Not with a spade. He took out stone after stone, and with each one he said aloud what it had been holding, so that the others would know too. It took longer than it would have with a crowbar, and nobody hurried him.
The last stone was flat, and he recognised it by its shape. He held it in his hand for a moment before he put it down.
And down in the middle of the Blind Passage, there was suddenly daylight. A slanting pillar of light with a sharp edge, full of drifting dust. It came from above, crossed the whole width of the passage, and ended on the wall as a bright stripe as long as a bench.
After thirty-four steps of dark, it was so much light that George had to cover his eyes.
Up on the slab, nobody said anything.
Down below, Mr Jacobs lifted his head into the light and said, "So now it's light that will drip down my collar."
He laughed about it for a whole week afterwards, mostly on his own.
But Mr Jacobs was right, and not only as a joke. Through the same hole that let the light in, water would come in with the first rain.
George thought about it for two days. Then he said he wouldn't leave it like that — because a wet stone in a dark passage is the same as spilt tallow, only you can't scrub it clean.
First he drew it. Only then did he build it: a low little roof of planks over the crack, standing on four stakes and tilted to one side, so that the rainwater would run off down the slope, while the midday sun would still get in underneath it. He tried it twice before he left it as it was.
And then he did one more thing that nobody had asked him to do. Around the crack he hammered in a low wooden railing, so that nobody would step into it in the dark or in the snow.
Light and water came through the same crack. One had to be let through and the other led away, and that was quite ordinary work with planks and nails.
5. It Wasn't False, It Was Borrowed
And now, the last thing.
At midday the next day, George came into the passage to fetch Mr Pearson's sign. It was standing where they had put it, turned exactly as they had left it. The piece of tin from the bucket was there too. So was the whitewashed board from the henhouse.
All three were still doing their work: they threw the same soft, pale patch onto the same wall as before.
Only now it couldn't be seen. Next to the daylight, that patch was nothing at all.
George picked up the sign and stopped short.
"Was it false light?" asked Spark. She still hadn't got it into her head, you see.
Luna stood in the pillar of daylight and thought for a long time, because it was a question that deserved it.
"It wasn't false. It was borrowed."
And then she worked it out aloud, step by step, the way she counts stars.
If there hadn't been any borrowed light, nobody would ever have seen the marks on the wall. If nobody had seen the marks, nobody would have known that a patch of light once moved along there. If nobody had known that, nobody would have worked out where the hole is. And if nobody had known where the hole is, Mr Shelley would still be sitting on the bench under the painted sea, and nobody would ever have asked him anything.
"That pale light brought us to exactly the place where we had to dig. And then it stopped being needed. It has nothing to be ashamed of."
Mr Shelley carried Mr Pearson's sign down. He polished it once more, so that it was nicer than when they had borrowed it, and took it back to the butcher. Mr Pearson laughed first, and only then asked what it was supposed to mean.
George did not throw away the drawing with the little roof and the slanting triangle. He hung it on a nail in the woodshed, next to the picture of the kite with nineteen little marks in the corner, and next to the picture of that little wind-powered windmill thing for the neighbour's cats — the one he still hadn't built.
That afternoon, Luna was the first to walk through the Blind Passage.
She didn't run, and she didn't hurry. In the middle she stopped. She stood on tiptoe and laid her palm on the bright patch on the wall, the way Granny Dora used to do. She looked up through the crack at a piece of sky, and then she walked on.
She didn't notice that she had walked the whole passage without counting her steps even once.
George followed her and saw it. He said nothing about it, which was very good of him.
Since that autumn, people in Betweenhills walk through the Blind Passage at midday even when they don't need to. They say they are going in to fetch a bit of the day.
Mr Jacobs gets drips down his collar now only when it rains, and he says that's quite all right.
And nobody renamed the passage. It is still called the Blind Passage, although from now on there is light standing in it at midday. Some names are older than the things they describe, and nobody minds.
In the evening the moon hung over the Crag, and Spark was looking at it again.
"Doesn't the sun miss that light?" she asked.
"No," said Luna. "The sun has no less of it."
Spark was quiet for a moment.
"That's the same thing the two of you did at the well," she said then. "One gives, and has no less."
"I suppose so," said Luna.
And then Spark asked the very last question:
"So then — isn't there somebody like me between the sun and the moon, too?"
Nobody answered her, because nobody knew.
Below the line
What Is Hidden in This Story
This is for you, the one who is reading. Let us remind ourselves what happened in the story and what it can tell us.
When help stops being needed, it doesn't mean it was wasted. Mr Pearson's sign helped the children see the marks on the wall. Without the marks, they wouldn't have known where to look for the crack. Once they had opened it, they no longer needed the sign to light the passage. Learning is similar. An explanation can help us understand something, and later we manage without it. What we have learned properly stays with us, even when we put the help aside.
Old records were written by people who knew their world differently from how we know ours. Whoever made the marks in the passage used the words of their own time and shortened them for themselves. Luna studied them for three days. She needed to understand what the writer had meant by them, and for some of them she still wasn't sure. Nor can we, faced with an unfamiliar old record, always assume that we understand its words at first glance.
What people before us found out, we can compare with what we find out ourselves. The marks told Luna that the passage once held a calendar. But to find the crack, the children also had to measure today's angle of the sun. The old record and the new measurement answered two different questions. Together they helped to solve one problem. We don't have to discover everything from the beginning. We can learn from what people found out before us. But we need to compare their knowledge with the knowledge of our own time, and check it against our own experience.
Even a person who stands in our way may have a good reason. Mr Shelley didn't want the children to dig into the slab. George got angry with him. But Mr Shelley knew which stone held up all the others, and what would happen if they pulled it out first. Once they had heard him out, they could open the crack safely. Before we brush aside someone's disagreement, it is worth finding out what they know and why they disagree.
Admitting what we have done can be hard. We can help by doing it all the same. Mr Shelley kept quiet about the plugged crack for years. The longer he put it off, the harder it was to talk about. In the end he said, "That hole is mine." The others found out what had happened, and he helped them. Silence solved nothing; his explanation did.
A person can mean to help, and still cause something they never meant. Mr Shelley stopped the water, but along with it he stopped the light. He didn't do it to hurt anybody. Later he protected the children from stones giving way. Once the crack was open, George built a little roof against the rain and a railing against falling. Understanding someone's good intention and putting right an unintended result can be done at the same time. When we solve one problem, it is important to notice what else will change because of it.
When we share knowledge, we don't lose any of it ourselves. In the evening, looking at the moon, Spark reminded them of what the children had done at the well: "One gives, and has no less." With knowledge, we can experience this ourselves. When we explain to somebody what we have understood, we both know it afterwards. And when everyone adds their own experience, we can learn more together.
We don't have to know the answer to every question. In the end Spark asked whether there might be somebody like her between the sun and the moon, too. Nobody answered her, because nobody knew. It is perfectly all right to say, "I don't know." We can go on investigating the question without making up an answer.
Juraj Tušš
