Day 63
Still digging near the lake on my way south, so everything is seeping water most of the time.
The soil here is very absorbent though, so I’ve made the habit of piling dirt up in berms around the areas where I’m working so I don’t get flooded out and have all my torches whisked away while I work. (This is especially important since the torches keep the worst of the local fauna at bay.)
I’ve also discovered some veins of clay near the water. It’s incredibly thick and solid stuff, but still feels malleable. If I could figure out why I’d need bricks, I’d make bricks out of it.
After it dries out a bit that is. Right now I’m keeping it in a bucket because it’s too wet to pile in a box. Pretty useless stuff, saturated clay.
When I was in school I took an elective clay class. Not the pottery wheel throwing class, that was too boring. I took a clay sculpture class, where we made all kinds of different shapes and vessels and statues. It taught me a lot about the behavior of certain kinds of dirt, and was probably one of the reasons why I was willing to go into mining as a career. Once you’ve spent an entire weekend pulling an all-nighter in the clay studio, covered in wet clay, slip, and dust, the idea of doing the exact same thing with bigger tools underground.
