“There are three things in a cavern on this coast. The trade puts one there, the village puts the second there, and the third was there before either of them, which is why we do not take lights into the back of any of them.”
As the gaps of the eastern shore tell it
The chalk on this coast falls every winter somewhere, and a face that goes lays open whatever it was standing over. In 4566 a fall opened a hole behind the shore. It was dry, and it went further than a lantern showed, and within the week the village nearest it had built a wall across its mouth, at its own cost, without a word to the corporation whose ground it is.
The gaps tell the rest by what they do. The wall has been renewed three times in two hundred years, by people nobody asked and who did not discuss it afterwards. Nobody else has been inside. The free trade, which uses the caverns of this coast and hides very little in any of them, will not put a cask in this one. And from October to March the parish keeps a lamp burning on the outside of the wall, on the parish account, for the same reason it lights the lanterns over its graves.
Ask a gap man what is in it and he will tell you that it holds nothing anybody put there, and that this is the whole of what is different about it. Ask him what the air is like and, if he answers at all, he will say it is wrong, in almost the same words as the only other account there is.
What is known
The Walled Hole is one of nine caverns known in the chalk behind the eastern shore, and one of the four the coast is careful about. Two of the four were opened by falls, in 4428 and 4566; both were known to the nearest village inside a week and neither was reported to anybody. It is dry and goes further than a lantern shows, and two separate accounts describe the air in it as wrong in almost the same words. The coast holds, without quite saying so, that a hole with people going in and out of it stays quiet. The Walled Hole has had nobody in it for two hundred years but the three parties who renewed the wall.
It lies among the voids under several square miles of chalk whose extent nobody has ever established, and which the Brethren at Wye have for two centuries declined to bound. What is in it, if anything, the coast will not say and nobody has written down. It is kept here among the horrors because the coast has never given it a shape, only a wall.