Page:Melbourne and Mars.djvu/74

72 'The find of copper you have seen,' said he, 'is one of the most fortunate of discoveries. The copper mines near the surface were almost worked out and the demand for copper is very great, and will be for a long time to come. I had been trying to carry electricity through other media, but found it not so good as the copper.'

'But this,' said I, 'is a very rich, heavy copper.'

'Yes, I know what you are going to say,' returned Brand, 'it contains gold and silver. If there was a good market for gold it would pay to extract it; but you see jewellery is not much worn, personal possessions conferring no distinction, and the coinage days are past and gone. Your medal is issued by the Central, but so few of those are in use that a ton of gold might serve the government indefinately.

'And the shaft, is not that a very ancient means of getting down for metals?' asked Grayson. 'I remember that the earth men used that means and similar winding gear, except for the motive power and the insulated rope.'

'The shaft,' answered Brand, 'is an expedient. It is sunk where it is in order that it may not interfere with the railway extension. Next year the cars will go direct from the surface and the copper will be cut out in bricks. The spiral line will corkscrew itself five miles more downward, and the copper field will be uncovered.'

'A spiral line,' said I, very much astonished; 'is the line we travelled to-day a spiral?'

'It is; and much of it is cut through solid loadstone, the kind of rock most used in accumulators. We get electricity, loadstone and copper from under our feet; part of the copper is under the ocean.'

'And what has been done with all the material taken out of that immense spiral?' I enquired.

Grayson answered:—'Some of the hills in this district are like Mount Weston, artificial; they have been made hundreds of years ago. Granby is a very ancient port, and its electrical works date from the Black Century. Our friend Harry Brand has had a thousand predecessors, who have in turn made improvements, and carried out the original plan to its present stage of completion.'

'And the copper?' I asked.

'That is a very fortunate find,' said Brand, again taking the conversation; 'we were boring to see how far the loadstone extended and cut into that bed. It lies as if a cavern had been run full of molten copper at some warm period, or as if a lake, of very uneven depths, had been filled and covered to the present depth during geological times.'

'To-day is not a fair sample of the days down there, I hope?' asked Grayson, looking very serious.