Well, the light today comes from burning cooking oil to provide a torch, so it's a fragrant light. And exactly how fragrant kind of depends on how much you like smelling old cooking oil a second time....
The light Ben's snoring woke myself twice, and Jimmy three times in the night, and probably shook the frame of the old place a few times too, but it wasn't too bad overall. As we headed out, again at first light, down to the creek with our bundle of rags and oil, an old compass that Ben had won in a poker game one sultry night in New Orleans -- we'd been down there looking for work and had been asked to handle a small 'gator problem that they had. It turned out, naturally enough, that the problem was small enough to describe as "a 'gator problem" and the gator itself was as long as school bus. There were some interesting efforts along our way, but we eventually managed to sink it to the bottom of one the Bayous where, if it can breathe underwater, it probably still is. Of course, sinking a 'gator involves getting it to eat something pretty heavy and it turned out that the lead we located for the purpose had been intended for other uses, so we found ourselves hiding the in the Mardi Gras carnival while we waited for our horses to arrive. So Ben was sat at a table dressed like a chicken with feathers this way and that playing poker against a man in a shabby black suit and a top-hat, a woman in a shiny fur-trimmed white bikini who fanned herself non-stop and on whom I couldn't see where the cellulite stopped and the sweat started, and someone who was dressed like a Marshall but was as drunk as a frat-boy during Spring Break after he got locked in the bar after hours. The game quickly got down to just him and the old man in the suit, and when the horses arrived Ben was one hand away from winning it all. The old man had smiled, thrown his cards in, and pushed over the last of a stack of greenish copper coins and a small box, and disappeared into the night. That box housed a compass that looked like Copernicus himself might have used it. Anyway, that was where our compass had come from, and we'd not had much occasion to use it so far, but I figured that if we were going underground it might not be a bad idea to know which way north was. We wanted rope, but I figured that the discreet approach here was to go and retrieve the balloon and use the ropes from that, which we would do this afternoon after we'd taken a quick turn around the cave and checked for any other forgotten golden trinkets -- petty cash, as Ben had started calling it. There was no sign of anyone watching us, and we'd split up, heading more north than we really needed to, to keep an eye out, but it looked like the slow-eaters from the night before were slow-thinkers too, and happy to believe our tales. We converged a little way up the mountain-side on the other side of the gulch, and located Ben's marked trees, and were back up by the cave in half-an-hour. "Light the torches inside or out?" asked Jimmy, unbundling them from over his shoulder. "Outside," said Ben. "Then sweep them inside, see if there's any coaldamp lingering in there. I don't much about copper mines, but other mines get whiffy after a while, and some of them smells are explosive-like." "Plus if you drop Ben's matches out here you can see well enough to pick them up again," I added.
Greg - I'm sure it'll be in a well ventilated space, so it'll be just fine...
Hah, love that can be described as a 'not too bad' night of sleep. And woo, that was quite the sidetrack with the compass (obviously I enjoyed every second of it).
Seems like smart thinking. Admirably cautious behavior, even, considering these guys' history...
Looking forward to seeing what they find in that cave!
2 comments:
Well, the light today comes from burning cooking oil to provide a torch, so it's a fragrant light. And exactly how fragrant kind of depends on how much you like smelling old cooking oil a second time....
The light
Ben's snoring woke myself twice, and Jimmy three times in the night, and probably shook the frame of the old place a few times too, but it wasn't too bad overall. As we headed out, again at first light, down to the creek with our bundle of rags and oil, an old compass that Ben had won in a poker game one sultry night in New Orleans -- we'd been down there looking for work and had been asked to handle a small 'gator problem that they had. It turned out, naturally enough, that the problem was small enough to describe as "a 'gator problem" and the gator itself was as long as school bus. There were some interesting efforts along our way, but we eventually managed to sink it to the bottom of one the Bayous where, if it can breathe underwater, it probably still is. Of course, sinking a 'gator involves getting it to eat something pretty heavy and it turned out that the lead we located for the purpose had been intended for other uses, so we found ourselves hiding the in the Mardi Gras carnival while we waited for our horses to arrive. So Ben was sat at a table dressed like a chicken with feathers this way and that playing poker against a man in a shabby black suit and a top-hat, a woman in a shiny fur-trimmed white bikini who fanned herself non-stop and on whom I couldn't see where the cellulite stopped and the sweat started, and someone who was dressed like a Marshall but was as drunk as a frat-boy during Spring Break after he got locked in the bar after hours. The game quickly got down to just him and the old man in the suit, and when the horses arrived Ben was one hand away from winning it all. The old man had smiled, thrown his cards in, and pushed over the last of a stack of greenish copper coins and a small box, and disappeared into the night. That box housed a compass that looked like Copernicus himself might have used it.
Anyway, that was where our compass had come from, and we'd not had much occasion to use it so far, but I figured that if we were going underground it might not be a bad idea to know which way north was. We wanted rope, but I figured that the discreet approach here was to go and retrieve the balloon and use the ropes from that, which we would do this afternoon after we'd taken a quick turn around the cave and checked for any other forgotten golden trinkets -- petty cash, as Ben had started calling it.
There was no sign of anyone watching us, and we'd split up, heading more north than we really needed to, to keep an eye out, but it looked like the slow-eaters from the night before were slow-thinkers too, and happy to believe our tales. We converged a little way up the mountain-side on the other side of the gulch, and located Ben's marked trees, and were back up by the cave in half-an-hour.
"Light the torches inside or out?" asked Jimmy, unbundling them from over his shoulder.
"Outside," said Ben. "Then sweep them inside, see if there's any coaldamp lingering in there. I don't much about copper mines, but other mines get whiffy after a while, and some of them smells are explosive-like."
"Plus if you drop Ben's matches out here you can see well enough to pick them up again," I added.
Greg - I'm sure it'll be in a well ventilated space, so it'll be just fine...
Hah, love that can be described as a 'not too bad' night of sleep. And woo, that was quite the sidetrack with the compass (obviously I enjoyed every second of it).
Seems like smart thinking. Admirably cautious behavior, even, considering these guys' history...
Looking forward to seeing what they find in that cave!
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