Napoleon's Roads Read Free Page A

stream disappeared into it as into a pool. He realised that if he poured sand over it the sand might clog the water’s exit point, wherever that was. If he was to concrete the floor it might, in this part, be as simple a matter as a plastic sheet and some sand levelled over it. It took some time – he did it in stages – but within two months he had laid a concrete floor, created a large cellar almost half the floor-size of the level above it, and was now thinking of fixtures. Perhaps a wall, dividing the space into two, with a door, on one side the wine cellar and on the other, furthest from the ladder, the darkroom, with a light outside to indicate when he shouldn’t be disturbed. Not that he really expected his wife would ever come down. Once set up with a bench and chair, an enlarger, developing trays; once water had been connected (but how to drain it?), he could disappear into it for hours.
    The water was a problem. Not the drainage from the sink, but the stream, or what had been the stream. Mounting behind his back during the winter. Since other things had distracted him, and the work had been suspended. A period of months when he did not go down. There was, after all, nothing stored there yet, nothing as yet that he needed to go down there to fetch.
    It was a dream that alerted him. Hard to explain, or would have been, had there been anyone he needed to explain it to. A murmuring, like an actual human voice trapped. He was out of the city when he heard it, in a motel in a dry country town, at three or four in the morning, on the edge of the desert. As he drove to the next town the following day, three hundred kilometres of almost-straight road, he thought of it continually. It seemed like a sign but there was no telling of what.
    Back in the city, however, it was days before he remembered and went down. And there it was, covering the concrete slab. Four or five inches of it. A dark pool which, when the trapdoor was opened, before the light was turned on, turned suddenly into a mirror in which he could see himself, in silhouette, with the light from upstairs behind him. He had no idea where it had come from. Perhaps, all along, the walls had been seeping when it rained heavily, but in the past, before the concrete, it had gathered to form the stream and so no-one had ever noticed. But now something had to be done. Maybe the stream had murmured for a reason. He brought down a crowbar, went to the part of the floor above the rubble-pool, and broke a hole in the concrete. When he went down again the next day the water had gone. He could now put in a drain, perhaps, so that the problem would not recur, but when he shone a torch into the hole, down past the concrete and the drooping, sand-covered plastic, he found that the rubble had receded. Perhaps the stream had done it. There was a gap, now, as deep as his forearm. A lair. He half-expected to find some creature in it.
    The concrete was thick but would not hold indefinitely. If he filled the space with sand or rubble there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t recede again and that that part of the floor wouldn’t collapse. He broke more of the concrete away and began to remove the rubble. When the pile beside the hole grew large enough and as yet there was no sign that the rubble was coming to an end, he hired another skip. It seemed clear now that all along the water had been disappearing into a fissure in a large sandstone boulder – another drifter in the sea of the earth that was now all around him. But no, it was going around and under it, disappearing further down. It was almost summer again. Upstairs, when he looked out at the smooth, flesh-pale branches of the great Sydney Blue Gum late at night, he fancied he could see in one of its highest forks the shape of a possum staring out over the wide basin of the suburb in the moonlight.
    From time to time as he worked he could hear his wife upstairs, moving about.
    It was a room, or could have