Rime of an Ancient Miner (2026)

A Ballad of the Abyssal Plain

I met her at a dinner held

to laud her work at sea.

She asked me what I knew of stone

and took a chair by me.

Her hands were wan about the glass;

her hair was going gray.

She’d finished her geologizing

a year ago in May.

The speeches hadn’t yet begun.

The wine ran through an aerator.

She placed a single igneous rock

beside the silverware:

We sailed the vast Pacific

in the middle of the spring,

with twenty men, a dredging rig,

and hardly anything

to occupy the afternoons

but weather, charts, and sleep:

our business was with manganese

three miles down the deep.

The nodules lay upon the plain

like pears beneath the tree,

though nothing there had ever known

the sunlight nor the breeze.

We scuffed at metal grain by grain

through ages without name.

One million years might add an inch.

We milked it all the same.

The captain held two nodules up

and guessed at what they’d cost.

He said, They are like cannonballs

from some forgotten war.

I told him how these layers grew—

how slowly matter came

to settle on a grain of sand

to make a thing of weight.

He listened with a pleasant face

and asked if I was sure.

I said that’s what the textbooks said.

He hungered after more.

The first descent was ravishing.

The cameras scoured the plain:

a dark and level country where

no weather brought the rain.

There anemones made of glass,

there sponges made of bone,

there creatures climbed on spindle legs

where nothing green had grown.

A flesh mass passed beneath the lens.

The operator laughed.

It had no mouth inside its head—

no smile drawn on its shaft.

We called it something ugly then.

(I cannot tell you what.)

The operator turned away.

The captain downed a shot.

We lowered down the gathering head—

the engines gave a groan—

and in the light, the sediment

rose softly from the stone.

We watched a little empire fade

beneath the vast array.

The captain said the pumps were good.

We carried on the day.

With nodule harvests came the eel,

its body pale and thin.

Its eyes were buried in its head,

its mouth beneath its skin.

The captain held it by the tail.

The men came round to see.

It had no face to speak of,

nor any wish to be

with us the living on the deck,

beneath an open sky.

The captain asked which end was ass.

The cook surmised it shy.

They left it with our specimens.

By morning, it was dry.

No one could say the hour when

the awful thing had died.

At first our figures pleased us all.

The weather held its course.

Headquarters sent its kudos

from its office on the shores.

We ravaged swill upon the deck;

chewed over what we’d found.

The cook baked us a chocolate puck.

The engines stirred no sound.

Then something in our samples changed.

The O2 lines had risen.

We checked the seals, checked them again,

and found no fault within them.

The chemist thought the sensors off.

The captain cracked a knob.

I said, Our rocks might play a part.

They said, So. Do your job.

I told them yarns of theory

about currents in the deep,

metals making differences

that water somehow keeps.

The captain said stop talking riddles.

I told him I cannot.

He quit rapping two nodules together

and mentioned he’d forgot

the time—he had a call to make

and markets closed at three.

He thanked me for explaining things

and asked to be excused.

By Thursday there was little left

where we had made our pass.

The camera showed a pallid waste

in water without gas.

A crab lay on its back and scratched

six knees across the silt.

A sponge had fallen sideways where

the sediment had built.

The captain told me stories like these

are common in the sea.

The crew agreed. The dredge went on.

I’d thought that might well be.

By Friday, they had had their fill.

The oxygen had fallen

in chambers placed upon the floor

where once the stones had lain.

We sent our numbers up to shore.

They asked us to repeat

the measuring and then advised

a rest of half a week.

We quit the dredge. The motors died.

The ship continued on.

Below us, in the camera light,

the stones and life were gone.

That night a vessel crossed our bow.

Its windows burned with light.

The watchman paged it twice by name.

It gave no sign that night.

We looked for it upon the chart.

We searched across the screen.

The captain said it must have been

a ship he’d somehow missed.

At dawn it hulked against the sun,

though nothing moved within.

All starboard black, its deck was bare,

the portholes glowed absinthe.

A woman slouched upon its bridge.

Beside her slouched a man.

They stalked our ship through sheets of rain.

We watched them as one can

read strangers through a restaurant pane—

uncertain whom they see.

The woman raised a wretched hand.

The man jumped out to sea.

By noon the vessel disappeared.

No wake was left behind.

The captain said the morning fog

had throttled all our minds.

But there had been no fog that day:

I’d written in my book.

The captain skimmed the entry once

and shot a shaded look.

The men began to speak of things

they’d heard beneath the hull:

a tapping like a fingernail,

the moaning of a skull.

The cook said that our breathing air

had acquired a rotten taste.

The captain smacked deep breaths himself

and said it tasted great.

The stench glopped out of every vent.

Our palates desert dry.

“Water, water, everywhere,”

We spewed Cook’s water pie.

Cook mopped up yak and quipped Coleridge.

The captain broke no smile.

Below us lay the emptied plain,

and there stretched many miles.

The captain rang the company.

The company rang back.

They sent for all our photographs,

our timetable, our map.

We messaged them the images,

the figures, and the dates.

They said the issue warranted

a meeting with the states.

The men who’d praised the dredging head

now spoke of what we’d done.

They said the captain should have known.

He said we all were one

in purpose when the work began.

They answered that was true,

but no one knew what stones might do.

And neither, then, did you.

On Sunday I went down again

by camera to the floor.

I wanted one more measurement.

I cannot admit more.

The plain was gray beneath the lights.

The nodules were gone.

The sediment had settled where

the dredging head had drawn.

And there, beside a broken sponge,

a creature twitched in view,

its body a suspended shaft

from which two nostrils grew.

It had no face I could decide—

no eyes to match my own—

its head erased to smooth and pale,

its phallic body prone.

I knew its kind. Its buried eyes

lay deep beneath the skin.

Its mouth was hidden underneath.

The light fell over it.

The operator reached to turn

the camera away.

I wrapped my fingers round his wrist.

I begged him to remain.

It moved across the broken plain

as silent as a stone.

I watched it wrench back its wan head

and felt myself alone.

No one could say what happened then.

No noise emerged from sea.

The creature did not know my name.

It had no need for me.

At once I yearned to keep the thing—

its sunk-eye, awkward grace,

its little mouth beneath its head,

its strange unfinished face.

I loved the way it lurched along

the bottom of the sea,

as though the world were quite enough

without someone like me.

That evening something struck the hull.

The captain called the crew.

We found no mark upon the steel,

no damage in our view.

The second blow came after dark.

The third came just before

the watchman saw the horrible ship

returning in the mire.

Its windows burned without a flame.

Its deck was bare and wet.

The woman slouched beside the man.

They stalked on like before.

The captain hailed the vessel twice.

Our radio eked a hiss.

The watchman said he recognized

that woman from a dream.

At midnight all the lights went out.

The engines wouldn’t start.

The ship lay quiet on the sea,

its instruments gone dark.

And from beneath us came a sound

like gravel in a tin,

like someone counting little stones

and dropping each one in.

The crewmen went down to their bunks.

The captain stayed above.

I sat beside the camera feed

and thought about the eel.

By morning three were very ill.

By noon, another four.

The cook was found beside his stove,

his nails scratched in the door.

The doctor said it might have been

an illness from the food.

The captain said we’d soon be home.

The weather remained good.

But one by one the sailors fell,

and none of us could say

what sickness moved among the men

or why it chose that day.

The captain died on Tuesday night.

He called me to his bed.

He asked about the little stones

and listened as I said

That no one knew precisely what

the nodules did below.

He turned his face against the wall.

He said he needed know.

I sat beside him till the dawn.

His breathing became slow.

I thought of all the things we’d learned

and all I did not know.

The vessel approached one final time

while I witnessed alone.

It drifted close across our side

without a scrape or groan.

The woman slouched upon its deck.

The man slouched at her side.

She held a little igneous rock.

He fell there with the tide.

I asked her what they wanted.

She never answered me.

Instead she dropped the nodule neath

the membrane of the sea.

It vanished there without a sound.

The drowned man turned a smile.

The vessel moved beyond the light

and disappeared awhile.

I waited for our ship to sink.

I waited for the end.

Instead the engines started up.

The radio cracked again.

A voice requested our position.

I informed them where we were.

They asked about the other men.

I could not find the words.

They brought me home in early June.

They questioned me for days.

They asked about oxygen,

the ship, the strange delays.

They asked if I believed the stones

had caused the men to die.

I said I did not know enough.

They asked me, again, why.

I told them of a faceless fish.

They wrote it in a file.

They asked if I’d been sleeping well.

I said it’d been a while.

The company was very kind.

They paid for me to rest.

They sent a letter thanking me

for giving it my best.

They said the data couldn’t prove

a change beneath the sea.

They said the nodules might be safe.

They said they’d wait and see.

I read the letter many times.

I found no fault with it.

The evidence was incomplete.

The facts were what they were.

And yet I dream of little stones

upon the ocean floor—

of all the years that gathered there

and gather there no more.

The woman at the dinner stopped.

The speeches had begun.

A gentleman approached the stage.

He thanked us, every one.

He spoke of innovation,

of the work that lay ahead,

of careful stewardship at sea

and all the lives we’d led.

The woman took the igneous rock

and held it in her hand.

She turned it over once or twice

as though to understand.

I asked her if she thought the stones

had made the oxygen.

She said she did not know, and turned

it in her palm again.

The room was warm. The glasses shone.

The dinner had been served.

A waiter asked if we would like

the fish or something else.

She looked at him a little while.

Then quietly she said

the fish would do. He gave a nod.

Two eyes shone in his head.

At last they called the company’s name.

The room roared with applause.

The chairman crossed the carpeted floor

and took a gold award.

He thanked the men who’d gone to sea;

the one who had returned.

He spoke about the things they’d found

and everything they’d learned.

The woman stood beside her chair.

It seemed she meant to go.

Instead she looked around the room

at all she did not know.

She opened up her mouth to speak.

The chairman raised his glass.

And somewhere deep beneath the waves

an eel went twitching past.

The chairman finished speaking.

His applause was long and warm.

Outside, the clouds were wringing

in unordinary storms.

And when the room had emptied out,

I found her standing there,

the little nodule in her hand,

beside an empty chair.

She asked me what I knew of stones.

I told her very little.

She said that she had once believed

the world was mostly still.

And then she told me everything

that I have told you here.

The waiters cleared the tables.

The morning would be clear.

The company subsequently reported that the expedition had yielded valuable preliminary findings. Further study was recommended. No causal relationship was established.