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I'm rereading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner, which I haven't done in quite a few years, and I'd completely forgotten the four-odd chapters two children and two dwarves spend climbing, falling, slithering, crawling, swimming and almost dying through perilous shafts and impossibly tiny, mud-filled, sand-filled, water-filled crevices a couple of hundred feet underground while escaping svarts in the old copper mines.
... I will take the Mines of Moria, balrogs and all, in a heartbeat before I go through that again. Holy shit. I honestly must have blocked those chapters out. I'm not even claustrophobic, at least not normally, but people who go caving/cave-diving are honestly nutters (apparently the real Alderley Edge Copper Mines, where Weirdstone is set, are open to cavers). I don't want to drown, in the dark, underground, because I got wedged in a hairpin bend in a tiny crevice too sharp and small for my long bones to fit through. Holy shit.
(No offense to real cavers, mind, you do you, but holy shit I would die of a heart attack less than two minutes in, and apparently that's all sorts of bad for everyone attached to me as well, so ... yeah. Probably for the best if I never go, yeah?)
Um. Right. I had completely forgotten this impromptu deadly earnest crash course on the perils of caving in the middle of my children's fantasy book. Wow. Okay. Moving on.
... I will take the Mines of Moria, balrogs and all, in a heartbeat before I go through that again. Holy shit. I honestly must have blocked those chapters out. I'm not even claustrophobic, at least not normally, but people who go caving/cave-diving are honestly nutters (apparently the real Alderley Edge Copper Mines, where Weirdstone is set, are open to cavers). I don't want to drown, in the dark, underground, because I got wedged in a hairpin bend in a tiny crevice too sharp and small for my long bones to fit through. Holy shit.
(No offense to real cavers, mind, you do you, but holy shit I would die of a heart attack less than two minutes in, and apparently that's all sorts of bad for everyone attached to me as well, so ... yeah. Probably for the best if I never go, yeah?)
Um. Right. I had completely forgotten this impromptu deadly earnest crash course on the perils of caving in the middle of my children's fantasy book. Wow. Okay. Moving on.
