Germinal - Emile Zola [261]
For an hour Le Voreux remained like this, breached, as though it had been bombarded by some barbarian horde. The screaming had stopped, and the growing circle of onlookers simply watched. Beneath the pile of beams that had once been the screening-shed, they could see the shattered tipplers and the smashed and twisted hoppers. But the worst damage was at the pit-head, where bricks had come raining down and whole sections of wall had crumbled. The framework of iron girders that supported the winding-pulleys had given way, and half of it was now hanging down the shaft; one cage was suspended in mid-air, and a piece of severed cable was dangling loose; tubs, ladders, sheets of cast-iron flooring all lay in a jumbled heap. By some chance the lamp-room had remained intact, and one could see its bright rows of little lamps over to the left. And there at the far end of its demolished housing was the winding-engine, sitting foursquare on its plinth of masonry, its brasses gleaming, its thick steel rods looking like indestructible tendons, and its huge crank sticking up at an angle like the mighty knee of some recumbent giant reposing in the sure knowledge of his own strength.
Following this hour of respite, M. Hennebeau began to entertain some hope. The earth must have stopped shifting, they would be able to save the winding-engine and the remainder of the buildings. But he still forbade people to go near and wanted to give it another half-hour. The waiting was becoming unbearable, and the raised hopes made the anxiety worse; every heart was beating wildly. A dark cloud looming over the horizon was hastening the onset of dusk, and a sinister twilight began to fall on the wreckage left by the earth’s tumult. They had all been standing there for seven hours now, not moving, not eating.
And suddenly, just as the engineers were starting to edge forward, one last convulsion of the earth put them to flight. There was a whole series of underground explosions, as though some monstrous artillery were firing cannon in the void. On the surface the remaining buildings toppled over and crumpled to the ground. The ruins of the screening-shed and the pit-head were swallowed up in a kind of whirlpool. Then the boiler-house burst apart and vanished. Next it was the turn of the square tower where the drainage-pump used to pant away at its work; the tower fell flat on its face like a man hit by a bullet. And then came the terrifying spectacle of the winding-engine, now wrenched from its moorings, fighting for its life on spread-eagled limbs. It was on the move, stretching its crank – its giant’s knee – as though it were trying to struggle to its feet; but then it fell back dead, crushed, and was swallowed up by the earth. Now only the tall, thirty-metre chimney remained standing, shaking like a mast in a hurricane. It looked as though it might shatter into tiny pieces and be blown away like powder when suddenly it sank in one piece, absorbed into the ground, melted away like some colossal candle; and nothing visible remained, not even the tip of the lightning-conductor. It was all over: the vile beast squatting in its hollow in the ground, gorged on human flesh, had drawn the last of its long, slow, gasping breaths. Le Voreux had now vanished in its entirety down into the abyss.
The crowd fled, screaming. Women covered their eyes as they ran, and the men were swept along like a swirl of dead leaves by the sheer horror of the scene. They tried not to scream, but scream they did, with their arms in the air and their lungs bursting, at the sight of the vast hole that had opened up. Like the crater of some extinct volcano it stretched from the road as far as the canal, fifteen metres deep and at least forty metres wide. The whole pit-yard had gone the way of the buildings, the gigantic trestles, the overhead railway and all its track, an entire train of tubs, as well as three railway wagons, not to mention the store of pit-props, a forest of newly cut poles that had been