On the Failure to Reoccupy Durn Ossek

The question most frequently put to me after a description of the Conqueror Worm is why the Dwarves have allowed Durn Ossek to remain abandoned for a century. It is commonly delivered with the air of a man who has discovered an omission in the conduct of an entire people. My answer is that they have attempted its recovery six times. The questioner generally means to ask why none of these attempts succeeded, although he has usually contrived, by then, to suggest deficiencies of courage, industry or filial affection. I have examined the reports of all six commissions. Each reached the same conclusion: the foundation stone of the mountain has been left so thoroughly unstable that fresh excavation would expose the workmen, and ultimately any inhabitants, to an unacceptable likelihood of collapse. Those who find this explanation insufficient are welcome to specify how many miners ought to be buried before it becomes persuasive.

The distinction between clearing a ruined chamber and restoring a hold must be understood before any sensible estimate can begin. A fallen roof may sometimes be secured where sound rock remains to receive the load; at Ossek, the difficulty extends beneath the proposed supports. The Worm passed through successive beds, severed natural buttresses and left enormous cylindrical openings across which the weight of the mountain has since sought fresh accommodation. Broken stone has settled into some of these cavities; water has carried finer material into others. A wall which stands today may depend upon a distant mass of rubble whose removal would ordinarily be the first business of a reclamation gang. The six surveys differed considerably in their proposed entrances and methods. Their agreement concerning the deeper instability is therefore more significant than six repetitions of a single inspection would have been.

During my own survey with Dorrin Ess in 1848, I proposed that a short heading be driven from an apparently sound passage towards the old drainage works. I had measured the exposed rock, inspected its fractures and persuaded myself that the intervening distance justified the risk. Ess asked what I supposed was carrying the floor. I answered with more confidence than information, a fault particularly disagreeable when one subsequently has to describe it in print. He lowered a sounding weight through a fissure beside my boot. It struck stone, slipped, struck again and continued beyond the point at which my proposed support should have existed. We withdrew. Measurements taken from the opposite gallery afterwards showed that the passage occupied the upper surface of a tilted block, held across a void upon bearings we could neither inspect nor calculate. My heading might have disturbed one of them. Ess accepted my apology without enlarging upon his victory, which was considerate, though it deprived me of any excuse to dislike him.

Improved machinery does little to resolve this particular difficulty. A steam pump can raise water only while its intake remains accessible, its delivery pipes remain intact and its own foundations remain where the engineer placed them. Ossek’s destroyed drainage connects flooded workings with fractures whose courses are imperfectly known. Lowering the water in one chamber may establish a current through loose material elsewhere and remove support from beneath an occupied passage. Nor does filling the Worm’s shafts offer the simple remedy sometimes proposed in correspondence: we have yet to measure the depth of one of them. Before calculating the quantity of fill required, a correspondent must therefore supply either a bottom or an explanation of how he intends to dispense with one. Even a filled shaft would leave the surrounding fractures, displaced beds and concealed cavities to be examined.

There is also no honest reckoning of the cost which begins and ends at the mountain door. A restored hold would require dependable water, approaches capable of bearing heavy traffic and places for the excavated spoil. The inland country is governed by Traditional Elven tribes, whose restrictions upon the destruction of plant life bind Dwarven settlements as they bind others. Extensive timber cutting and the burial of a wooded valley beneath spoil would consequently require negotiation. Access from the coast involves the kingdom of Aurenca. I heard a reclamation advocate dismiss these matters as foreign interference and asked him whether his estimate included the purchase of foreign timber or merely its theft. He thought my language excessive. His estimate contained no allowance for either compensation or permission, so I have retained the language.

Dwarven claims introduce further complications, though their persistence is often misrepresented as an impediment peculiar to Dwarven stupidity. An unrepealed right may survive the destruction of the premises in which it was exercised. Thus an association proposing to recover a furnace floor can find itself obliged to accommodate an ancient right of passage through that floor, while the passage itself hangs in fragments above a flooded cavity. Such questions require settlement before substantial investment; they remain questions capable of settlement. Several claimants had already agreed to exchanges and consolidations when their commission’s geological findings ended the undertaking. It is unjust to blame those negotiations for a failure determined by the rock. I pressed this point upon a secretary who wished to place “uncertainty of title” first in his summary, presumably because a title could be referred to another office.

The wish to return is sufficiently evident in the money spent upon these repeated examinations. Some families still possess keys to doors whose very chambers have disappeared, and I have seen a surveyor carry his grandmother’s plan beside his own, carefully protecting both from the wet. I should be reluctant to explain his commission’s withdrawal as indifference. There may eventually be means of securing part of the mountain; I do not know whether there will be, and none has yet survived competent examination. Until then, the proper undertaking is continued observation from positions that can be reached without unreasonable danger. I recommended such provision myself. A seventh commission would be justified by new evidence or a practicable new method; mere dissatisfaction with the first six conclusions is an expensive reason to send men underground.