Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,10

of glaciation. Of course they were all completely wrong, as it turned out. But you could tell he wasn’t really talking to us – he was trying to impress Dr Harcourt. Maybe he was hoping she’d give him a job.

I wasn’t really listening because we were getting close to the most interesting things in the whole boring place, which were the two diggers. From where we’d started out, they’d looked small enough to be toys, but as we got nearer, there were murmurs of excitement at the size of them. The diggers towered over us like mechanical dinosaurs. If you’d stuck three of our coaches on top of each other, those machines would still have been taller. The caterpillar tracks alone were as high as a bus.

When we were about 15 metres away from them, Dr Harcourt held up her hand and we all stopped.

“Can’t we go and see them up close, miss?” asked Gav.

“It’s doctor, actually, not miss,” snapped Dr Harcourt. “And we have to stop here. It wouldn’t be safe to get any nearer.”

The digger’s driver looked like a flea from where we stood.

“Why’s the driver wearing a gas mask?” asked Jayden.

“It’s not a gas mask,” said Dr Harcourt, smiling her weird smile. “It’s a dust mask. Just basic health and safety, because he’s out here all day.”

“Do the children need one?” Mr Watkins asked, sounding a bit worried.

Dr Harcourt shook her head. “Not for one visit! If they got jobs here it would be a different matter.” She turned to us, and said in this really patronising way, “So who’d like to work here?”

Liam’s hand shot up. “Me! I want to drive one of those!”

“Would you like a demonstration of what it can do?” Dr Harcourt asked him.

Suddenly everyone was enthusiastic. Dr Harcourt waved at the driver of the closest digger, and I saw him raise his hand in reply. There was a roar and blast of diesel fumes as the engine started up. This close, it wasn’t a distant clattery sound, it was like a motorway full of cars; most of us put our hands over our ears because it was so loud.

“Shouldn’t we move back a little?” yelled Mr Watkins.

“It’s perfectly safe!” Dr Harcourt shouted back.

The digger’s arm jerked and lifted, the bucket opening smoothly.

“We have been preparing the site for some time,” yelled Dr Harcourt over the noise, “but it’s only recently that we’ve reached the layers of material we are interested in. These two machines aren’t clearing topsoil any more, they are mining rare earth metals.”

“Do you do all the mining that way?” Ruksar shouted.

Dr Harcourt shook her head, as the digger arm moved through the air and began to lower.

“Impressive as they are, these machines can’t extract enough raw material by themselves. Very soon we are going to start blasting. By which I mean explosive charges will be used to dislodge far greater quantities of material from the hillside.”

“Can we see that?” someone shouted. Now the trip was getting better!

But Dr Harcourt shook her head. “The entire site will be cleared, and the explosives detonated by remote control. No one gets to see the blast go up, I’m afraid.”

Behind her, the bucket smashed into the ground with an enormous thunk, and everyone in our class jumped. The jaws bit, then closed and lifted. You could see that even though they talked about clay, what the machine was digging was more like soft rock. Chunks fell from the bucket jaws as the arm lifted up again.

“Each scoop of these diggers moves ten tons of material,” shouted Dr Harcourt.

The top of the digger spun on its base, and the bucket jaws opened again, dropping ten tons of rocky clay. The sound rumbled like an earthquake. A cloud of grey-white dust rose up and spread into the air above us.

“I think maybe we are too close,” called Mr Watkins.

Dr Harcourt looked at him. “There’s really nothing to be frightened of.”

But Mr Watkins was right, because now the grey-white dust was drifting down, settling on everyone’s hair and faces. It was all over me, coating my skin, inside my mouth. People were coughing and wiping their eyes. My eyes started watering, scraping grit every time I blinked, so everything was sparkling and blurred.

You know in Superman films, how the kryptonite glows? Well that’s got to be wrong, because kryptonite’s only a chunk of Superman’s planet and you can’t have a whole glowing planet. I bet kryptonite just looks like ordinary rock, otherwise Superman would fly off