SIDEWAYS, OUT OF COURTESY

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a young man from a dry country is taught the manners of House Delve, and takes four days to stop being offended.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

House Delve digs sideways.

Every soul in this realm knows it and nobody outside it can be got to believe it, and the misunderstanding that follows is so reliable that the Delves have a word for the visitor it happens to. They call him a Straight, and they say it the way you might say a nephew — with affection, and a certain weariness, and an eye on the furniture.

The most celebrated Straight was a mining engineer of two-and-twenty, brought up from a dry country at considerable expense to advise on efficiency, and I have the whole of his week from three people who were there and who agree about everything except the pie.

He arrived at the Delve workings on a Monday and did the sums on the Tuesday, and the sums are not in dispute. They were correct then and they are correct now, and if you put them to any engineer alive he will tell you the same thing:

The Delves are digging the longest possible route to everything.

Their workings go out sideways from the shaft in great patient curves, and where a seam lies below them they do not go down to it; they go along, and around, and come at it from the far side, and the distance they walk in a working life is, by his figures, something over six hundred miles more than the job requires.

He put this to them on the Tuesday evening, in the long room, with the figures written out.

And they were delighted. That is the part he could not account for at the time and told for the rest of his life. They were not offended and they were not ashamed; they passed the paper down the table and several of them whistled and old Nan Delve said it was the most beautiful piece of arithmetic she had ever had read at her, and they gave him more pie.

Then they carried on digging sideways.

He tried again on the Wednesday, more slowly, in case it was the accent.

And a man called Tam Delve — pick-man, about forty, patient as a wall — put his cup down and gave him the answer, which the Straight wrote in his notebook that night and underlined twice with the pen going through the paper:

"We know, lad. It's manners."

The Straight said that manners were all very well but that six hundred miles was six hundred miles.

"Aye," said Tam. "And?"

"And it's inefficient."

"Aye," said Tam, comfortably. "It is that."

Here is what he was four days working out, and I set it out here in the plain order because the Delves themselves will not, holding that a thing you have to be told is a thing you have not understood.

Down is where the water is.

That is the whole of it. That is the entire foundation of Delve manners and every rule that comes off it. In a realm made of bog, a working that goes down goes wet, and a wet working is not merely a nuisance — the water in this country does not stay where you find it. It moves. Take the bottom out of a seam and you have not only flooded your own gallery; you have given the water somewhere new to be, and it will go there, and it will go on going there, into somebody's else's workings, or somebody's well, or somebody's cellar, next week or next year or in forty years when you are dead and it is not your name on it any more.

You cannot see whose. That is the point. You cannot see whose, and so you go round.

The Delves have therefore arrived, over six hundred years underground, at a code of manners in which going down is not dangerous — they are not frightened of it, they will go down in an emergency and be back up by tea — but rude. Straightforwardly, socially rude, in the way that reaching across a table is rude. It is a thing you do not do in front of people because of what it does to the person you cannot see.

And out of that comes the whole of their etiquette, which is elaborate, and which they take entirely seriously, and which is why the pick-song has the line it has.

"Never in, never down past done."

The Straight had been hearing it sung all week and had taken it for a work rhythm, which it is. It is also the law, and it means: never go into another's working, and never go below the level of what is already finished. Both halves are courtesies to somebody you have not met.

A Delve does not sink a new shaft without walking the ground above it first and knocking at every door within earshot — not to ask permission, which nobody would grant or refuse, but to say where they will be digging. It takes a morning and it has no legal force whatever and not one Delve in six hundred years has skipped it.

A Delve who breaks into water shouts. Immediately, at the top of the lungs, before anything else, including before getting out — the word is WET and it goes up the gallery and out of the shaft and across the top and it is the only occasion on which a Delve will shout at all.

And a Delve does not say the word below at a table. This is the one the Straight fell over twice. There is a set of polite substitutions — the lower, the far side, the long way — and they are used without any solemnity, in the way you might avoid a subject at a christening. He asked, on the Thursday, what the taboo was.

Nan Delve told him there was no taboo, and that they simply did not care to discuss the plumbing at meals, and everybody laughed, and the Straight understood that he had been given the true answer and a joke at the same time and that the Delves regarded these as the same thing.

He went home on the Saturday and wrote a report which is, by the standards of such reports, remarkable — because it recommended no change whatever.

It is four pages long. Three of them are the arithmetic, which is unaltered; he never withdrew a figure. The fourth is one paragraph, and it is the paragraph that got him laughed at in his own profession for some years and quoted with approval in this one ever since:

The workings are the longest possible and the practice is correct. The gentlemen underground are not failing to find the short way. They have found it, they have costed it in a currency my figures do not carry, and they have declined it. I recommend no alteration and I am obliged to record that I was four days understanding a thing that a girl of eight down there explained to me with a jug.

The girl of eight is the best part and I have it from two of them.

He had asked her — on the Friday, having given up on the grown ones — why not just go straight down, and she had taken his cup and a jug and poured water on the table, and let him watch it run, and said:

"That's your gallery. Where's it gone?"

He said it had gone to the edge.

"Whose edge?"

And he opened his mouth and had no answer, and she nodded at him the way an eight-year-old does when a grown man has finally caught up, and mopped the table with her sleeve, and said the thing that is on the wall of the long room now because somebody wrote it there afterwards in chalk and nobody has washed it off:

"We don't dig for us, mister. We dig for the next lot down the lane. That's all the sideways is."

The Delves still dig sideways. They still walk their six hundred extra miles. They still knock on doors to tell people where they will be, and they still will not say below at a table, and every few years another Straight comes up with another set of correct figures and gets the pie and the whistling and the same reply.

"We know, lad. It's manners."

Efficiency is a measurement taken from one place at one time, and courtesy is what a trade develops when it has spent six hundred years learning that the person its shortcuts will drown has not been born yet — so if you are ever shown a route that is plainly the long way round, ask what it goes around, before you improve it.