The Lost Stream

Part One · The Swallow Hole

Behind Juno's school in Carrow Bridge there was a stream that simply stopped. It came chattering down off the moor, slipped beneath the fence at the corner of the playing field, and meandered along the bottom of the hedge for a few hundred yards, and then, beside a crooked hawthorn tree, it poured into a hollow in the grass and vanished. There was no pond and no drain, only a funnel of mossy boulders, a sound like an enormous bath emptying, and then silence. Juno had observed it from the fence every lunchtime since September, with the permission of Mr. Abara, her science teacher, who called it the swallow hole and admitted cheerfully that nobody knew where the water went. Juno found this outrageous, because an entire stream could not simply be misplaced, like a glove. It had to emerge somewhere, and she was determined to discover where.

Mr. Abara pinned a large map of the district to the classroom wall and invited everybody to write a prediction on a sticky note. Nearly every note landed on Ladywell, the spring in the village half a mile downhill, which bubbled out of a stone archway beside the church and had been flowing, according to its plaque, since the twelfth century. It was the obvious answer, because water traveled downhill and Ladywell was the nearest place downhill where water emerged from the ground. Juno placed her note there too, although something about it nagged at her. On the bus home she passed the road cutting at Hob Lane, where the hillside had been sliced open to accommodate the road. She watched the stripes of pale rock slide past the window, every layer tilted at the same angle, like volumes leaning on a library shelf.

Her Aunt Delphine was a member of the Mendle Caving and Hydrology Club, which convened on Thursday evenings in the back room of the library and spent its weekends exploring underground with helmets, lamps and waterproof notebooks. When Juno described the swallow hole, Aunt Delphine became extremely interested, and explained that the hills surrounding Carrow Bridge were limestone. Rainwater, she said, absorbed a little carbon dioxide from the air and the soil and became very slightly acidic, not enough to sting a finger. Over thousands of years, however, it was enough to dissolve limestone grain by grain, widening every crack into a channel and every channel into a passage. The hill beneath Juno's school was probably riddled with them. There was a reliable method of discovering where they led, Aunt Delphine said, and it involved a completely harmless dye that glowed an astonishing green.

The technique was called dye tracing, and cave scientists had relied on it for well over a century. You poured a fluorescent dye into the water where it disappeared, and then you monitored every spring where it might possibly reappear. The dye was perfectly harmless to fish, plants and people, Aunt Delphine said, which was why the water authority permitted it, although the club still had to apply in writing and wait for official approval. Because the dye could become too diluted to see, the club also anchored little mesh pouches of charcoal, called detectors, in each spring. Charcoal absorbed the dye even when nobody could see it, and afterwards the pouches were posted to a laboratory, where a sensitive instrument could identify the faintest trace. Juno asked whether she could help. Aunt Delphine said she had been hoping Juno would ask.

Permission arrived in February. On a raw, gray Saturday morning six club members in waterproofs assembled beside the hawthorn tree, together with Mr. Abara, who had brought a flask of tea for everyone, and Juno, who had brought her notebook and a pencil sharpened at both ends. The club had already positioned charcoal detectors in Ladywell and in two smaller springs on the same side of the hill, each one tethered to a stake with orange string. Aunt Delphine let Juno unscrew the bottle. The dye was a dark reddish liquid, but the moment it touched the stream it bloomed into a green so vivid that it looked artificial, like ink from a highlighter pen. It swirled around the boulders, circled the funnel twice, and vanished into the hill with a gurgle, and Juno realized that she had been holding her breath.

Part Two · The Stripes

For two weeks Juno inspected Ladywell every afternoon on the way home, with her mother waiting patiently in the car, peering into the stone basin for the slightest tinge of green. There was nothing whatsoever. The water emerged from the archway as transparent as glass, exactly as it had for eight hundred years. Every few days a club member exchanged the charcoal detectors for fresh ones and posted the old ones to the laboratory, and every few days the laboratory replied that it had detected nothing either. At the end of the second week Aunt Delphine telephoned to say that the club was declaring the test inconclusive. Perhaps the dye had been too weak, or the underground route was extraordinarily slow, or the water had traveled somewhere none of them had considered. Juno said she understood, then went upstairs, lay on her bed, and felt thoroughly cheated.

In class Mr. Abara removed every sticky note from Ladywell and left them clustered at the bottom of the map, uncertain where they belonged. Juno discovered that she could not stop thinking about it. The obvious spring had been wrong, which meant the obvious reasoning had been wrong as well, and water flowing downhill had evidently not been the complete explanation. On Monday, on the bus, she passed the road cutting at Hob Lane again, and this time she pressed her forehead against the window and studied the stripes until they disappeared behind the hedge. Every layer of limestone sloped downward toward the north, whereas Ladywell lay to the south. She had passed those stripes twice a day for two years without a second thought, and for the first time she wondered whether the water inside the hill could feel them too.

That evening she asked Aunt Delphine whether underground water obeyed the slope of the fields or the slope of the rock. Her aunt went silent on the telephone for so long that Juno assumed the line had disconnected. Then she explained that limestone was deposited in layers, called beds, and that the gaps between the beds were frequently where water traveled first, so the passages could follow the tilt of the rock rather than the contours of the landscape above it. It was not a rule, she said carefully, but it was an excellent question. Juno spread the district map across the kitchen table and drew an arrow from the swallow hole in the direction the stripes leaned. The line ran northward, straight through the hill and down the other side, until the arrow touched a blue symbol in the neighboring valley labeled Blackwater Rising.

Nobody in the club had positioned a detector at Blackwater Rising, because it was two miles away, on the far side of the hill, in a different valley altogether. That was precisely why Juno believed it deserved one. She summarized her reasoning on a single page, with the arrow and a diagram of the tilted stripes, and Aunt Delphine read it aloud at the next club meeting in the back room of the library, while Juno sat in the corner pretending to examine a leaflet about bats. There was an agonizing pause. Then an elderly member called Mr. Fenwick, who had been caving for fifty years, announced that he had always been suspicious of the Rising, because it ran muddy on days when no rain had fallen in its own valley. The club voted to repeat the experiment in March, with a detector in every spring on both sides of the hill.

Part Three · Blackwater Rising

Blackwater Rising was a shadowy archway at the base of a cliff, half concealed by ferns, where a river surged out of the hill as though somebody had left a faucet running inside it. A short passage extended back from the entrance to a motionless pool, and the club secured a detector there, deep in the gloom. This time Juno was permitted to accompany Aunt Delphine inside, wearing a borrowed helmet with a lamp on the front, rubber boots two sizes too large, and gloves that her aunt inspected twice for holes. The air inside was cool and damp and smelled of wet stone, the walls glistened, and somewhere further back the water made a sound like distant applause. Juno felt a small, cold shiver travel up her spine, not quite fear, and decided that she rather enjoyed it.

The second dye test took place on the first Saturday in March, at the hawthorn tree, with twice as many spectators as before, because word had spread around Carrow Bridge. Mr. Abara had brought the flask again, several of Juno's classmates had persuaded their parents to accompany them, and Mr. Fenwick arrived wearing a tweed hat with a pheasant feather in its band, which he said had been his lucky caving hat since 1974. Juno poured the dye herself, with hands that were not entirely steady. It bloomed green against the boulders exactly as before, circled the funnel, and vanished into the hill. Then there was nothing to do but wait, which Juno discovered was the most excruciating part of science, and considerably more difficult than anybody ever admitted in lessons. Mr. Fenwick remarked that in his experience a watched spring never glowed, and went home to finish his crossword.

On Tuesday after school Aunt Delphine collected her and drove the long way around the hill to the neighboring valley, because Mr. Fenwick had telephoned and said only that they should come and look. They climbed through the ferns to the shadowy archway with their lamps switched on. The river emerging from the hill appeared ordinary in the daylight, faintly brown, but at the back of the passage, where the pool lay motionless in the darkness, Aunt Delphine angled her lamp across the surface and stepped aside so that Juno could see. The water was glowing a faint, unmistakable green, the color of the dye in the stream behind her school, shining up out of the rock like something alive. It had traveled two miles through the hill in three days, northward, exactly as the stripes leaned.

The laboratory confirmed it a week later from the charcoal detector, and Ladywell, once again, had shown nothing at all. Mr. Abara read the letter aloud to the class, then handed Juno a marker and asked her to draw the route on the district map. She drew a dotted line from the swallow hole through the middle of the hill to Blackwater Rising, slanting north like the stripes in the road cutting, and her classmates transferred every sticky note to the end of it. The club entered her name in its records as the person who had proposed the connection. That lunchtime Juno stood at the fence and watched the stream pour into the hollow beneath the hawthorn tree, and for the first time it did not seem to be disappearing at all. It was simply going home the long way, and she knew exactly which way that was.