Germinal - Emile Zola [250]
‘So you’re off, then. Where to?’
‘Oh, somewhere. I don’t know.’
‘But we’ll meet again?’
‘No, I don’t expect so.’
They fell silent, and remained standing in front of each other without finding anything else to say.
‘Well, goodbye then.’
‘Goodbye.’
As Étienne climbed towards the village, Souvarine turned round and went back to the bank of the canal; and there, alone now, he walked and walked, with his head down, so much a part of the darkness that he was little more than a moving shadow of the night. Occasionally he would stop and count the hours chiming in the distance. When midnight struck, he left the towpath and headed towards Le Voreux.
At that hour the pit was empty, and he met only a bleary-eyed deputy. They wouldn’t be firing up till two, ready for the return to work. First, he went up to fetch a jacket, which he pretended he’d left in a cupboard. Rolled up inside the jacket were tools, a brace and bit, a small but very sharp saw, and a hammer and chisel. Then he left. But instead of going out through the changing-room he slipped into the narrow corridor that led to the escape shaft. And with his jacket tucked under his arm he climbed gently down, without a lamp, measuring the depth by counting the ladders. He knew that the cage was catching at the three-hundred-and-seventy-four metre point, against the fifth section of the lower tubbing. When he had counted fifty-four ladders, he felt about with his hand and came on the bulge in the timbering. This was the spot.
With the skill and cool deliberateness of a good worker who has given much thought to the task in hand, he set to work. He immediately began by cutting a panel out of the shaft partition with his saw, so as to gain access to the main winding-shaft. Then, with the aid of matches, which flared and quickly went out, he was able to assess the state of the tubbing and the extent of the recent repairs.
In the area between Calais and Valenciennes the sinking of a pit-shaft was an exceptionally difficult business as they had to pass through the water tables, immense sheets of water that lay at the level of the lowest valleys. Only by installing tubbing, in the form of pieces of wood joined together like the staves of a barrel, was it possible to contain the springs that fed them and to insulate the shafts in the middle of these deep, dark lakes whose waters lapped against their outer walls. When they sank the shaft at Le Voreux, they had had to put in two sections of tubbing: an upper one, through the shifting sands and white clay that are found in the vicinity of cretaceous rock, which is itself riddled with cracks and swollen with water like a sponge; and then a lower one, directly above the coal itself, passing through a yellow, flour-like sand of almost liquid consistency; and this was where the Torrent was, the subterranean sea that terrified the pitmen of that region, a real sea with its own storms and wrecks, a forgotten, unfathomable sea of rolling black waves more than three hundred metres below the sunlight. Generally the tubbing held firm, despite the enormous pressure, and the only real problem came from the settling of the surrounding earth, which had been destabilized by the constant movement of abandoned workings gradually caving in. When the rock sank like this, large cracks sometimes appeared and spread as far as the tubbing, causing it to buckle; and this was where the main danger lay, the threat of major subsidence and the flooding that followed, when the pit would be filled with an avalanche of earth and a deluge of underground springs.
Sitting astride the opening he had made between the two shafts, Souvarine saw that the fifth section of the tubbing had been very badly warped. The wooden staves were bellying out beyond the framework that held them in place, and indeed several had come loose. Numerous little jets of water, pichoux as the miners called them, were spurting from the joints, despite the tow and pitch with which they were lagged. And