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Waking up without an alarm clock is the best way to start a productive day.
Alistair is one of those rare few, a Morning person.
Still the saying is of course only a general rule, and like all general rules subject to change.
If asked, Alistair may give you the example from 2 months ago, when he drank a physically unhealthy quantity of alcohol, for a mentally unhealthly reason. Finding himself blind stinking drunk he woke up without an alarm clock, because he slept through it. As you might imagine, it was a less than optimal start to a day.
Or in the particular case of less than a second ago, waking up without an alarm clock was not the best way to start the day because Alistair found himself in pitch black, laying on a stone floor, amid rapidly flowing water at his feet, a high pressure stream of water directed at his chest, not sure how he got there, or what was going on.
So, as Alistair's mind came around to wakefulness he thought:
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"This was perhaps the worst way to start a productive day.
...
Start?
That doesn't seem right. This couldn't be the start to the day... What had happened?
Alistair Turn over onto his chest to stop the spray of water hitting his face.
"Surely if I went to sleep in my house I wouldn't be getting flooded on the 2nd floor?"
In a Vegas suburb? That's just stupid.
No...wait...
No I had sold the house. Sold EVERYTHING. That bastard Nathan had gone behind my back and forced a sale of our little company to Contrice Construction. It seemed so stupid too, I remember thinking that all they really got was the book of business. I didn't understand it until i realized...
No... focus... don't get distracted.
I would have slept in my trailer parked outside the mine.
THE MINE!
Fuck!
I had been chipping at that wall. It got damp, i assumed it was just condensation, and then the rock broke outwards water and stones throwing me back. It must have knocked me silly."
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Even though he been knocked silly, the situation itself was not silly...
Infact it was quite serious. Caves or Mines, and water in the Dark, do not mix.
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Alistair felt around for the portable work light he had been using before. "Damn" he said, realizing that it must have been swept away and shorted out in all this water.
After all he thought: "who spends more money on getting the waterproof work light for digging underground in the deserts of Nevada? Not me apparently. And what kind of company would build in an extra "unneeded" quality features like water proofing for free? Certainly not Harbor Freight, that's for sure."
"Oh well, my phone has a water proof case at least."
Alistair felt around for his cellphone and was relieved to find it in his front right pocket where he had left it. Propping himself up on his elbows Alistair pulled the phone up under his chest and powered on the screen, the tunnel was illuminated by the pale soft light.
Seeing now the water was not hitting the area next to him, Alistair shimmied over out from under the flowing torrent of water, sat up to his knees, and looked around.
The tunnel that he had been digging in had been following a single 8-ish foot tall strata in the rock, maybe another 8 feet wide, dead end on his side, and running some 40 feet back to the main vertical shaft of the mine.
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If you can pardon a narrator his aside it may help you to understand this geological feature by imagining 3 layers of cake stacked on top of each other. These bands of cake, or rock, are called strata for the plural, or stratum singular, which is fine for rock but would make a rather sad cake.
In the case of this particular mine, the previous miners had worked to cut away only the middle layer of that rock/cake to create the tunnel. This left a solid strata of rock above and below to act as the roof and floor of the tunnel, both of which were tilted at nearly 20 degrees. Not the most efficient method by today's standards, but back when this mine had been truly operational it would have saved a pretty penny on bracing the tunnel with wood beams. As they say in mining "A penny saved is a penny you don't have to dig out of the damn ground again."
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Kneeling feet from the splashing water Alistair wasn't sure if he should be annoyed or happy with the previous miners. On the one hand, the natural slope imparted by the rock strata had kept him from drowning in all this flowing water while he was knocked out. On the other hand perhaps the damn tunnel wouldn't have failed if it had been a flat square affair with proper bracing. Clearly it must have failed, in some way, as where else would all the water be coming from.
He tried to unlock his phone but his fingers were wet, and the phone case was wet. Alistair wiped his fingers on his shirt, trying again in vain to unlock the phone before realizing that his shirt was also quite wet... ... ... obviously. "I was just effectively knocked out by what felt like a fire hose to the face, of course I'm all wet." he said to himself.
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Alistair I stood up and tried to shake the water off his phone and fingers. With a bit of trouble he managed to unlock the phone, and get the proper flashlight turned on.
With some proper light, he could see the hole in the rock. ... or rather the water fall. It was about a foot and a half across, and maybe 6 inches high running along the top the right hand side of the tunnel wall where it met the top strata. There was still water flowing with enough pressure to reach half way across the 8 foot wide tunnel. He looked down the tunnel to see the water flowing back in the direction of the main vertical shaft. He knew there were a few more levels farther down that I had not explored yet, and wondered how much of that was now, or would soon be, under water. "How long had this been going on?" he thought
"Well, my mind still works, so I doubt I was unconscious for more than a few moments or MAYBE a minute, and that flow isnt too big."
keeping to the higher and dryer side Alistair walked down the tunnel to the main shaft. He could see the water falling off into the darkness... that and it seems the flow of water was washing all over the ladder and rail, it didn't seem worth the risk to try and step in the fast moving stream of water flowing over the rock, just to try and grab the now slick metal rungs of the ladder/stair or rails of the ore elevator.
Not able to safely leave, he reasoned one of two things could happen. 1st the water level would rise enough, in which case he could safely grab the ladder/stair in the vertical main shaft without fear of falling; and climb out. Or, the flow would stop or slow enough that he could safely attempt to climb out of the main shaft. So walking back to the hole, he set a stop watch on his phone, took a seat in a dry place and thought.
"It looks like i hit some sort of cave system."
Looking more closesly under his new water fall he could see the large section of wall that collapsed to reveal the long thin hole at the top of the wall. If he had hit a cave system it might explain why there was water under this hill in the middle of the Nevada desert. "Maybe it got trapped the last time this place was an ocean or something." he thought
"no, that doesn't fit. I'm not a ocean water scientist... but even I know that ocean wate should be salty. This was clearly not salt water. Ocean was a dumb idea anyway, trapped rain water was far more likely. Or a natural formation like those seich wind traps from Dune or something." He laughed.
"ha, imagine if I had literally underMINED a seich water reservoir, that would really piss off the locals."
He sighed "So chalk it up to crazy nature" he thought. "I must have weakened the stone a few days ago when I uncovered that portion, water did what water did, and I just happened to be in the way when it popped the cork so to speak."
So with nothing left to do he checked the time, then settled down to wait the water out.
...
...
...
he waited 2 hours.
2 FREAKING HOURS!
That's how long it took for the water flow to get down to a trickle, for the first hour or so it seemed like it was flowing about a home Depot bucket of water every second. The most basic visualization of 5 gallons he knew of. He had a life spent in construction to thank for that. "So 5 gallons, times 60 seconds, times 60 minutes, over that first hour it must have put out between 15,000 and 20,000 gallons of water, quite a bit less in that 2nd hour but I say there is now at least 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of water at the bottom of my mine shaft.
Not my day!
With the water flow down to garden hose level, the roar of rapids had transformed to splashing and slapping noises on the stone, and the echo in the tunnel added a wet sputtering growl sorta effect to it. Still with the flow that low it seemed safe enough to head to the vertical shaft.
As he walked back he thought about getting to his trailer to dry off, change clothes, and bitch about the the cost of pumping out all that water. But would he need to pump out all that water? "Maybe it would just increase humidity and keep the upper part of the mine cooler during the....
WHAT!?!"
His phone's light had just reflected off something catching his eye. Near the top of the previous water line, in one of the surface undulations of the rock sat a small pool of water, maybe a cup worth... and gold! little flakes of it, the surface here combined with the initial agitation of the water must have worked like a curve in a stream collecting alluvial gold. Normally when gold flakes are picked up by water through erosion they tend to get thrown and deposited in areas where the water speed goes from fast to slow, such as a sharp turn in a river, or a transition from river to flood plain. That's why people used to pan for gold in those areas. Heck when he brought up prospective ores to get assayed he used a sluice box to test it; and thats just an application of the same natural principal. The tunnel shaft had acted as an inefficient sluice box.
"... but" he thought "an ineffective sluice box collecting so much?" Even in a low grade but commercially viable ore you only get a few grams of gold per tonne of ore, and a high grade ore might have 8 or maybe 10 grams of gold per tonne, and you only get a fraction of ore per ton of rock. Some commercial operations can have run with concentrations of less than 1 gram of gold per tonne of rock. There was easily a gram worth of gold dust in that little spot. And while there had be a lot of water, presumably washing out a good deal of sediment, this little indent covered only a small portion of the flow... infact looking around there were quite a few visible speck of gold littering the indents of the floor.
"God, how many ounces of gold got carried down to the bottom of the mine shaft?!"
"Wait... more importantly is what sort of rock formation had so much gold in it to start?!?!"
"forget drying off" he thought "I need to see what's in that new cave section. ... ... where's my pick?"
Luckily the pick had not washed away as it had fallen next to him on the high side of the tunnel.
Walking back to the large crack of a hole the water had slowed to a dribble... but even though the water was now quietly dribbling down the face of the wall, the sputtering growl noises remained. faint and distant He had thought that was some effect of the echo from the water splashing around. "maybe there are there rocks falling around in that cave area?"
Holding up the phone light, pick in hand he looked through the hole, but could not see much of anything.
The roof strata continued past the hole where he was, but seemed to end to either side of his hole 5 or so feet to each side, but extending forward for a deceptive distance he couldn't make out. It seemed his hole was at the bottom of a small funnel of sand. Just sand, and the peninsula of rock that was the continuation of the roof strata were all he could see, both in the way blocking his view. But clearly there was some sort of cavern present.
The sand was interesting, something you don't usually find in a cave, and something he had not noticed before. "Infact do you EVER find sand naturally in a cave?" He could see now some of the fine sand sticking to the wall, where it was washed over by the far slower trickle. It must have been these sands that held the flakes of gold he spotted.
Curiosity getting the better of him, and excited to see how much very valuable sand was in this cavern Alistair climbed up on some of the rock which had fallen when the hole opened. The way the stone split it had under cut the hole by breaking off more rock below the crack than at the actual breech. As a result the layer of rock at the bottom of the hole was rather thin. So he swung the pick at the bottom lip of the hole to widen it.
Swing, chip
Swing, chip
Swing, chip
Swing, ...and a miss ... "Shit"
Swing, chip
With each chip he removed more water would slowly flow. It seemed he had struck some sort of underground reservoir of water which had drained to the level of his hole. The slow flow of water brought more sand with it, but was moving too slow to carry it far.
Soon he was standing on a pile of damp sand and rock, and pulled himself up to the now wider hole he could fit through.
"Finally a good look of this new cavern" he thought.
He poked his head above the rim of the sand funnel and with his phone's flashlight he looked up, and saw a high dome ceiling.
Climbing out of the sand pit, with his light following down he looked and saw walls over a hundred feet away in every direction.
Turning where he stood, he looked and saw the waters of the underground lake around him.
Finally he faced the direction of the once distant growling noises which had just stopped.
he looked... and saw goblins.