Lust for Life

Jacques first took him into a room where many kerosene lamps were hanging on racks, each under a specific number. “When we have an accident down below,” said Jacques, “we can tell which men are caught by the lamps that are missing.”

The miners were taking their lamps hastily and rushing across a snow-covered yard to a brick building where the hoist was located. Vincent and Jacques joined them. The descending cage had six compartments, one above the other, in each of which a coal truck could be brought to the surface. A compartment was just large enough for two men to squat comfortably on their haunches while going down; five miners were jammed into each of them, descending like a heap of coal.

Since Jacques was a foreman, only he and Vincent and one of his assistants crowded into the top compartment. They squatted low, their toes jammed up against the sides, their heads pushing against the wire top.

“Keep your hands straight in front of you, Monsieur Vincent,” said Jacques. “If one of them touches the side wall, you will lose it.”

A signal was given and the cage shot downwards on its two steel tracks. The free way through which it descended in the rock was only a fraction of an inch larger than the cage. An involuntary shudder ran through Vincent when he realized that the blackness fell away for half a mile beneath him and that if anything went wrong he would be plunged to death. It was a sort of horror he had never known before, this rocketing down a black hole into the abysmal unknown. He realized that he had little to fear, for there had not been an accident with the hoist in over two months, but the shadowy, flickering light of the kerosene lamps was not conducive to reasoning.

He spoke of his instinctive trembling to Jacques, who smiled sympathetically. “Every miner feels that,” he said.

“But surely they get used to going down?”

“No, never! An unconquerable feeling of horror and fear for this cage stays with them until their dying day.”

“And you, Monsieur . . .?”

“I was trembling inside of me, just as you were, and I have been descending for thirty-three years!”

At three hundred and fifty metres—half-way—the cage stopped for a moment, then hurtled downward again. Vincent saw streams of water oozing out of the side of the hole, and again he shuddered. Looking upward, he saw daylight about the size of a star in the sky. At six hundred and fifty metres they got out, but the miners continued on down. Vincent found himself in a broad tunnel with tracks cut through the rock and clay. He had expected to be plunged into an inferno of heat, but the passageway was fairly cool.

“This is not at all bad, Monsieur Verney!” he exclaimed.

“No, but there are no men working at this level. The couches were exhausted long ago. We get ventilation here from the top, but that does the miners down below no good.”

They walked along the tunnel for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then Jacques turned off. “Follow me, Monsieur Vincent,” he said, “mais doucement, doucement; if you slip once, you will kill us.”

He disappeared into the ground before Vincent’s eyes. Vincent stumbled forward, found an opening in the earth, and groped for the ladder. The hole was just large enough to pass a thin man. The first five metres were not hard, but at the half-way point Vincent had to about-face in mid-air and descend in the opposite direction. Water began to ooze out of the rocks; mud slime covered the rungs of the ladder. Vincent could feel the water dripping over him.

At length they reached the bottom and crawled on their hands and knees through a long passage leading to des caches situated farthest from the exit. There was a long row of cells, like partitions in a vault, supported by rough timbers. In each cell a unit of five miners worked, two digging out the coal with their picks, a third dragging it away from their feet, a fourth loading it into small cars, and a fifth pushing the cars down a narrow track.