Jay Wurscher peered down the open manhole. Beneath him shimmered water so clear he could forgive a man for confusing it for gin. More than 30,000 gallons of rainwater were below him, but soon they'd be gone. The College's Cistern would be pumped dry, and he could descend into the vaulted structure and poke around with a flashlight, making sure the Cistern's stucco and brick were in sound condition.
In a previous life, before operating the College's Central Energy Plant (known to students as the "smoke factory"), Wurscher had been in the Navy, spending more than 20 years aboard nuclear submarines. Little did the young sailor know that his service would be the perfect preparation for this unusual assignment. Like a submarine, the Cistern is dark and cramped. Leaks and cracks, too, are a very bad thing.
Joining Wurscher was Charleston architect Craig Bennett. Readying themselves for descent, the men stepped into full-body contamination suits and strapped on harnesses. Dangling beneath a tripod, they were lowered by cable down an 18-inch manhole. Bennett, already a slight man, made himself even thinner, putting his arms above his shoulders in order to squeeze down the narrow hole into the Cistern's womb.
"It's definitely an unpleasant trip," Bennett says. "You're completely at the mercy of someone winching you up and down. There's no possibility of self-rescue to get out of there."
In 1857, the Cistern was built at the College to hold water for fighting fires. It was the latest of a handful of construction jobs in that immediate area. A year before, Towell Library was built. A few years before that, architect Edward Brickell White designed Porters Lodge and added wings and a portico to Main Building, known today as Randolph Hall. Rainwater that hit the roofs of Randolph Hall and Towell Library drained into the Cistern.
In September, the College began a $4.4-million restoration of the facades of Randolph Hall, Towell Library and Porters Lodge. Three years before work began, the College readied plans for the restoration and inspected the structures in the Cistern Yard. During this time, Wurscher and Bennett took their memorable trip into the Cistern.
When the men touched down almost 9 feet below the lawn, they stood in a mess of muck. They sloshed their way across the 30-foot square chamber, ducking beneath the arched vaults.
Wurscher marveled at the engineering. "The level of construction is like an interstate bridge. It's massive," he says.
Bennett marveled at what seeped around his shoes and oozed out of pipes.
"It's pretty nasty down there," he notes.
Though a few roots had poked through the brick walls and dozens of old glass bottles were on the floor, Wurscher and Bennett were happy to see that the Cistern was in remarkable condition, if a bit dirty.
"It's perfect, as a matter of fact," Wurscher observes.
Their inspection complete, the men were hoisted back above ground, happy to be out of the muck and back in the sunlight. 
Thousands of alumni have crossed the Cistern to receive their diplomas, but few have ventured below. We asked four faculty members what they think lurks beneath. Here are their
imaginative answers:
For the better part of a lifetime, I have wondered what our Cistern must contain. Suspicious of a ruse, I dismissed long ago the notion that only water was once stored there. Something more important must surely lie beneath its oval exterior.
All I know for certain is that I have walked across the Cistern a thousand times over, played around its bricks, studied in the cool of its luscious grass, enjoyed the views from its perspective and experienced love in its embrace.
So among many things it may contain, I am comforted that our Cistern is the source of a lifetime of memories and, as I would like to imagine, the vessel of the same as I melt into its history.
Physicists often talk about empty places, but we know that nothing is really empty. The Cistern is full of the real and the ethereal. Each cubic meter in that void is about 1.2 kilograms of air, composed of the usual nitrogen and oxygen, but also neon and helium and krypton and argon, and others.
Some reasonable assumptions allow you to calculate that taking a breath in the Cistern, you will breathe some molecules also breathed by Jesus. As profound as that thought might be, the same can be said of a breath you take outside of the Cistern. Get some perspective about recycling, and give a few moments thought to others who breathed the very same atoms - your grandparents and their grandparents, too.
Most people would be surprised to know that below the Cistern is a beautiful but cozy book-lined room with a soft hooked rug, a working fireplace, cushy chintz chairs and a fabulous selection of wines. On the coziness scale, it ranks up there with the bedroom in the children's book Goodnight Moon.
The only passage to the room runs from a trap door in one of the downstairs offices of the old Towell Library, but I bet the occupant of that office has no idea the passage exists. In fact, I think I'm the only one who knows, and I can't reveal how I know.
The Cistern's catacombs do fill with small amounts of water. Its high-water mark is set immediately following the spring graduation ceremony. Composed mostly of perspiration, trace levels of blood and tears, and sometimes inspiration, this flood surpasses liquid quanta from "natural phenomena."
Thankfully, this rarefied liquid does not remain in the Cistern for long. Overnight it follows the same aquifer to join the Ashley and Cooper rivers and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean, where it disperses and affects the world.
Such is the way of the fluids, such is the way of education and inspiration.