The Caves of Rosenburg Hill

In the little cluster of three hamlets that makes up the village of Zichen Zussen Bolder, they still tell an old story about a horseman who was galloping across the fields and suddenly disappeared into the earth, never to be seen again. Six years ago three village houses abruptly slid into the ground. Only last August, on the day of the village fair, the roof of the Catholic church collapsed.

None of these happenings was supernatural. The village and its fields stand on a thin crust of soft clay over a vast labyrinth of caves and tunnels some 30 miles long where, since Roman times, men have undermined their homes by quarrying out the sandstone to build them. The quarries, abandoned in the 1900s, were put to new use in 1918 when Willem Heynen and other villagers discovered that the cave galleries had the ideal temperature and humidity for growing mushrooms.

Warning Sounds. Early one morning last week Willem Heynen's son Pierre drove his car from the fog-filled village street into the warm, brightly lit caverns under Rosenburg Hill. More than 100 workers were tending the long trays filled with sand and manure in which the mushrooms grow. Extra help had been taken on to meet the rush of holiday orders. A worker complained to Pierre that the gallery walls had been making a cracking sound. Pierre, who knew that the walls had been cracking and creaking for centuries, sent the men to another area.

At 9 a.m. the walls began cracking again. As some workers straightened, there was suddenly an enormous sigh that forced a windstorm through the miles of galleries, and the whole slope of Rosenburg Hill caved in. As 400,000 tons of stone and earth crashed into the caverns, the three tunnel mouths spouted out flying stone and dust like miniature volcanoes. Screaming men and women ran bloodily from the caves, dragging with them other workers who had been knocked unconscious. Groping through the thick fog, slipping on the wet clay topsoil, they screamed for help. The village priest and the schoolteacher spread the alarm, and fare brigades soon arrived from the Belgian cities of Hasselt and Tongres. and from the nearby Dutch city of Maastricht. They saw with horror that the hill was still moving convulsively, with craters 10 ft. wide appearing in the earth.

The King's Visit. By late afternoon, King Baudouin arrived, ventured over a mile into still unshaken galleries to comfort the wives and children of missing workers. On Christmas Day the tremors continued. Even the gallery visited by King Baudouin caved in, and when a rescue-workers' tent set up on the hillside suddenly vanished into the bowels of the earth, all 150 rescue workers were withdrawn. Four mushroom growers were known dead, 14 were missing, and 20 injured. Among the missing: Pierre Heynen in his automobile. His father, Willem, whose initiative had helped bring prosperity to Zichen Zussen Bolder, groaned: "If only I had never started this! If only we had remained poor!"

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