Good Omens

His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes. They’d been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.

He picked up his pen and wrote down: “XXXV QVVX.”

Translated, it meant: “Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest.”

* * *

“It jolly well isn’t!”

“It jolly well is!”

“It isn’t, you know!”

“It jolly well is!”

“It isn’t.. all right, then, what about volcanoes?” Wensleydale sat back, a look of triumph on his face.

“What about ’em?” said Adam.

“All that lather comes up from the center of the Earth, where it’s all hot,” said Wensleydale. “I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.”

The other Them looked at Adam. It was like watching a tennis match.

The Hollow Earth Theory was not going over well in the quarry. A beguiling idea that had stood up to the probings of such remarkable thinkers as Cyrus Read Teed, Bulwer.. Lytton, and Adolf Hitler was bending dangerously in the wind of Wensleydale’s searingly bespectacled logic.

“I dint say it was hollow all the way through,” said Adam. “No one said it was hollow all the way through. It prob’ly goes down miles and miles to make room for all the lather and oil and coal and Tibetan tunnels and suchlike. But then it’s hollow after that. That’s what people think. And there’s a hole at the North Pole to let the air in.”

“Never seen it on an atlas,” sniffed Wensleydale.

“The goverment won’t let them put it on a map in case people go and have a look in,” said Adam. “The reason being, the people livin’ inside don’t want people lookin’ down on ’em all the time.”

“What do you mean, Tibetan tunnels?” said Pepper. “You said Tibetan tunnels.”

“Ah. Dint I tell you about them?”

Three heads shook.

“It’s amazing. You know Tibet?”

They nodded doubtfully. A series of images had risen in their minds: yaks, Mount Everest, people called Grasshopper, little old men sitting on mountains, other people learning kung fu in ancient temples, and snow.

“Well, you know all those teachers that left Atlantis when it sunk?”

They nodded again.

“Well, some of them went to Tibet and now they run the world. They’re called the Secret Masters. On account of being teachers, I suppose. An’ they’ve got this secret underground city called Shambala and tunnels that go all over the world so’s they know everythin’ that goes on and control everythin’. Some people reckon that they really live under the Gobby Desert,” he added loftily, “but mos’ competent authorities reckon it’s Tibet all right. Better for the tunnelling, anyway.”

The Them instinctively looked down at the grubby, dirt.. covered chalk beneath their feet.

“How come they know everything?” said Pepper.

“They just have to listen, right?” hazarded Adam. “They just have to sit in their tunnels and listen. You know what hearin’ teachers have. They can hear a whisper right across the room.”

“My granny used to put a glass against the wall,” said Brian. “She said it was disgustin’, the way she could hear everything that went on next door.”

“And these tunnels go everywhere, do they?” said Pepper, still staring at the ground.

“All over the world,” said Adam firmly.

“Must of took a long time,” said Pepper doubtfully. “You remember when we tried digging that tunnel out in the field, we were at it all afternoon, and you had to scrunch up to get all in.”

“Yes, but they’ve been doin’ it for millions of years. You can do really good tunnels if you’ve got millions of years.”

“I thought the Tibetans were conquered by the Chinese and the Daily Llama had to go to India,” said Wensleydale, but without much conviction. Wensleydale read his father’s newspaper every evening, but the prosaic everydayness of the world always seemed to melt under the powerhouse of Adam’s explanations.

“I bet they’re down there now,” said Adam, ignoring this. “They’d be all over the place by now. Sitting underground and listenin’.”

They looked at one another.

“If we dug down quickly.. ” said Brian. Pepper, who was a lot quicker on the uptake, groaned.

“What’d you have to go an’ say that for?” said Adam. “Fat lot of good us trying to surprise them now, isn’t it, with you shoutin’ out something like that. I was just thinkin’ we could dig down, an’ you jus’ have to go an’ warn ’em!”

“I don’t think they’d dig all those tunnels,” said Wensleydale doggedly. “It doesn’t make any sense. Tibet’s hundreds of miles away.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. An’ I s’pose you know more about it than Madame Blatvatatatsky?” sniffed Adam.

“Now, if I was a Tibetan,” said Wensleydale, in a reasonable tone of voice, “I’d just dig straight down to the hollow bit in the middle and then run around the inside and dig straight up where I wanted to be.”

They gave this due consideration.

“You’ve got to admit that’s more sensible than tunnels,” said Pepper.

“Yes, well, I expect that’s what they do,” said Adam. “They’d be bound to of thought of something as simple as that.”

Brian stared dreamily at the sky, while his finger probed the contents of one ear.

“Funny, reely,” he said. “You spend your whole life goin’ to school and learnin’ stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there’s all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin’, that’s what I want to know.”

There was a chorus of agreement.

Then they went out and played Charles Fort and the Atlantisans versus the Ancient Masters of Tibet, but the Tibetters claimed that using mystic ancient lasers was cheating.

* * *

There was a time when witchfinders were respected, although it didn’t last very long.

Matthew Hopkins, for example, the Witchfinder General, found witches all over the east of England in the middle of the seventeenth century, charging each town and village nine pence a witch for every one he discovered.

That was the trouble. Witchfinders didn’t get paid by the hour. Any witchfinder who spent a week examining the local crones and then told the mayor, “Well done, not a pointy hat among the lot of them,” would get fulsome thanks, a bowl of soup and a meaningful goodbye.