• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1695 0

and dangerous hours they finally managed to reach the rescue shafts, and then they had the gruesome task of bringing the victims up to the surface. Neither the deputy nor the three men were dead, but they were covered in terrible burns and giving off a smell of roast meat; having inhaled the burning air, they had suffered further burns all the way down their throats. They kept screaming and begging to be put out of their misery. One of the three miners was the man who, during the strike, had demolished the pump at Gaston-Marie with that final blow of his pick; the other two still had the scars on their hands where their fingers had been cut or rubbed raw from throwing bricks at the soldiers. As they were carried past, the crowd of onlookers, each of them white-faced and trembling with shock, bared their heads.

La Maheude stood waiting. Eventually Zacharie’s body appeared. His clothes had been burned away and the body reduced to an unrecognizable, charred lump. The head was missing, blown to bits by the explosion. After his ghastly remains had been placed on a stretcher, La Maheude followed them mechanically, her eyes blazing, without a tear. Holding the sleeping Estelle in her arms, she cut a tragic figure as she left the scene, with her loose hair blowing in the wind. Back in the village Philomène received the news in stunned silence but soon found relief in floods of tears. La Maheude, on the other hand, had immediately turned round and gone back to Réquillart: the mother had brought home her son and was now returning to wait for her daughter.

Another three days went by. The rescue work had resumed, despite the appallingly difficult conditions. Fortunately the new shafts had not collapsed in the firedamp explosion, but they were thick with hot, foul air and more ventilators had to be installed. The hewers relieved each other every twenty minutes. And on they went, with only two metres remaining between them and their comrades. But now they worked with a heavy heart, and if they struck hard into the coal, it was only by way of revenge; for the tapping had stopped, and its bright little tune was no longer to be heard. This was the twelfth day of the rescue work and the fifteenth since the disaster; and that morning a deathly silence had fallen.

This latest accident had revived the interest of people in Montsou, and so many bourgeois were enthusiastically arranging excursions to the mine that the Grégoires decided to follow the fashion. They wanted to make a party of it, and so it was agreed that they would drive to Le Voreux in their carriage while Mme Hennebeau would bring Lucie and Jeanne along in hers. Deneulin would show them how his repair work was progressing, and then they would come back via Réquillart, where Négrel would be able to tell them how far the rescue shafts had got and whether he thought there was still hope. And then they would all have dinner together that evening.

At three o’clock, when the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile stepped down from their carriage at the ruined pit, they found Mme Hennebeau already there, dressed in navy blue and carrying a parasol to protect herself from the pale February sun. The sky was perfectly clear, and there was a spring-like warmth in the air. M. Hennebeau happened to be there also, with Deneulin; and she was listening with a rather absent air as the latter told her about everything that had been done to mend the breach in the canal. Jeanne, who always had her sketchbook with her, had begun to draw, captivated by the violent beauty of the scene; while Lucie, sitting beside her on a wrecked railway wagon, was in similar ecstasies and finding it all ‘thrilling’. The dyke, as yet unfinished, was still leaking in many places, and foaming water was tumbling into the enormous cavity of the flooded mine. Nevertheless the crater was gradually emptying, and as the water-level dropped, so it uncovered the terrible mess beneath. On this beautiful day, under the soft blue of the sky, it looked like a cesspit, the remains of a ruined city that had sunk into the mire.

‘So