The Ant Gallery

At three feet the augur went slack. Half a turn with nothing under it, and the bore came up carrying air. I have learned what that means, and it is not a fault in the ground. The augur had gone through a roof.

The taproot goes down from the surface like a road, and at its foot the road arrives somewhere: a gallery, chambers off it, the whole of it shored and vaulted and kept. Ants, and their rooms. I had stood at the surface beside the tree that owns the root and seen nothing but a tree. The root is the gallery’s beam and its street both, and the gallery is why the road was built, or the road is why the gallery was, and I could not tell you which, any more than I could tell you whether the town made the harbor or the harbor the town.

This archive has recorded a works under the ice of the creek, a whole small nation at labor that a census would miss. Here is a works under the field. A floor above it the threadwork runs sideways, carrying whatever word the ground carries; a floor below, the old lake sand moves its water in the dark. The ground is not a solid. It is a building, and the floors are let to different tenants, and the augur is a stranger on the stairs.

I will set down the cost as well, because the log should carry it. The augur learned there were rooms by ruining one. That is the nature of a boring, and I do not know a way around it: the survey is not innocent going down, any more than it is innocent on the surface, only quieter about it. I drew the one room I had broken and left the rest of the city undrawn, which is the only apology a surveyor has.

Three feet down, the county is still inhabited.