I continued exploring, snooping around, my headlamp swinging to and fro as I rambled about. I'd found the big sign with the bright bold red lettering announcing the blasting schedule for the mine and the work shop. I'd found the lunch room with its benched tables and had enjoyed reading the sign hanging above the table asking, "Have You Washed Your Hands Before Eating" and I poked my head into the hoist operators room and it was there, as my eyes wandered all about, that abruptly my everything came crashing down as I focused on a faded, yellowed sheet of paper affixed to the wall and there, there they were, L. Baker, B. Baker, A. Perez, S. Perez, D. Garcia, J. Thompson, Norman and on and on.
And this big ol' room that I'd earlier imagined all lit up, in my mind now I found it fleshed out with people moving about doing a myriad of tasks. They had names those busy people, they were there on the wall, they may still have lacked faces, but with names, they didn't seem so foreign, they weren't strangers any more. Strangely as I moved about, I found it comforting, knowing they were there, those ghosts of the past.
The guys humored me for awhile longer before finally, we all headed back to the truck, locking the mine door securely behind us. From here, we visited several other mines over the course of the day, driving to some, hiking to others and always moving fast as the guys pushed to give me a decent overview of Darwin's underground workings, an impossible task given the amount of time we'd have. These were big mines, old mines, and one things for sure, these mines were intense!
We explored huge spacious underground galleries whose roofs were supported by massive raw tree trunks, unsawn and recovered from the local hills during the earliest days of mining well over one hundred years ago, and we squirreled into twisting and turning maze-like sub-levels, into confusing over and under hand stopes and we trudged down endless tracked tunnels always delving deeper and deeper into the workings.
And there we found our crystal treasures. Seth spent some time in an area from which he'd recovered some decent linarite specimens while Keith worked a large aurichalcite exposure and I spent way too much time playing in a shattered fault rich in calcite crystals. We all had fun and we all brought out a little of this and that before we again took off for more exploring, vowing to return.
Unfortunately we never did return, there was just way too much to see and the hours went by way too fast. I loved this time, time spent underground. It's truly a different world and a place where your emotions can run the full gambit from being blissfully calm to being extremely anxious. And always there's the darkness and the silence, thick and cloying and the overwhelming heaviness, the weight of the rock itself, have no doubt, this is another world!
With the hours past and a long day behind us, we eventually loaded up and turned back towards camp. We'd stir up a bit of grub and then later, we'd head over to visit John for another game or two of pool before finally, we called it quits and headed off to bed.
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