Germinal - Emile Zola [173]
II
At Jean-Bart Catherine had already been rolling tubs for an hour, delivering them as far as the relay-point; and she was drenched in such a lather of sweat that she stopped for a moment to wipe her face.
From the depths of the seam where he was digging out coal with the rest of his group, Chaval was surprised not to hear the usual rumble of wheels. The lamps were not burning well, and the dust made it impossible to see.
‘What’s up?’ he shouted.
When she replied that she thought she was surely going to melt and that her heart was fit to burst, he called back angrily:
‘Bloody fool! Why don’t you take off your shirt like the rest of us?’
They were at a depth of seven hundred and eight metres, in the first road of the Désirée seam, about three kilometres away from pit-bottom. Whenever this part of the mine was mentioned, the local miners would turn pale and lower their voices, as if they were talking about hell itself; and more often than not they merely shook their heads in the way of people who didn’t want to discuss this deep, remote place where the coal burned red and fierce. As they extended northwards, the roadways drew closer to Le Tartaret and entered the area of the underground fire that had turned the rock overhead a dark red. At the point to which they had now dug, the average temperature at the coal-face was some forty-five degrees. They were right in the middle of the accursed city of the plain and in among those flames that passers-by up on the surface could see through the cracks, spitting out sulphur and foul-smelling gases.
Catherine, who had already taken off her jacket, hesitated for a moment and then removed her trousers also; and with her arms and legs bare, and her shirt tied round her hips like a smock with a piece of string, she began once more to roll her tubs.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she shouted.
If the heat stifled her, it also made her dimly afraid. For the past five days since they had started working there, she had been remembering the stories she had heard in her childhood about the putters of the past who were still being roasted alive under Le Tartaret as a punishment for unmentionable deeds. Of course she was too old now to believe such nonsense; but what would she have done nevertheless if she’d seen a girl come through the wall looking as red as a hot stove and with eyes like burning coals? The very idea of it made her sweat even more.
At the relay-point another putter would come and take the tub and roll it a further eighty metres along the track to the edge of the incline, where the seizer would dispatch it along with all the others that were coming down from the roads above.
‘Blimey! Make yourself at home, why not?’ said the woman, a thin-looking widow of thirty, when she saw Catherine dressed only in her shirt. ‘I can’t do that. The lads on my stretch never give me a minute’s peace with all their dirty nonsense.’
‘Oh, to hell with the men!’ replied Catherine. ‘It’s this heat I can’t stand.’
And off she went, pushing her empty tub. The worst of it was that down in this remote part of the mine the proximity of Le Tartaret was not the only cause of the unbearable heat. The road ran parallel with some old workings, deep in Gaston-Marie, next to an abandoned roadway where a firedamp explosion ten years earlier had set fire to the seam; and the fire was still raging behind the break, a wall of clay which had been built alongside it and which was kept in constant repair in order to contain the disaster. Starved of oxygen the fire ought to have gone out; but draughts from unknown sources must have continued to feed it, and so it was still burning ten years later, warming the clay in the break like the bricks in a kiln, with the result that the heat could be felt through it along the whole length of the wall. And it was beside this break, over a distance of a hundred metres, that the tubs had to be rolled, in a temperature of sixty degrees.
After two more trips Catherine was again overcome with the heat. Fortunately the road