Germinal - Emile Zola [277]
‘God Almighty!’ Étienne swore softly.
Catherine huddled against him, as though she had felt the darkness trying to grab her. Quietly she recited the miners’ saying:
‘Death blows out the lamp.’
Yet in the face of this new threat they instinctively fought on, revived by a feverish desire to live. Étienne began furiously to dig into the shale with the hook from the lamp, and Catherine helped with her bare nails. They carved out a kind of raised bench, and when they had hoisted themselves on to it, they found themselves sitting with their legs dangling and their backs hunched under the roof. The icy water now reached only as far as their heels; but gradually they felt its cold grip on their ankles, and their calves, and their knees, as the flood rose remorselessly, inexorably, higher and higher. They had not been able to level the seat out properly, and it was so wet and slimy that they had to hold on tight in order not to slide off. The end had come, for how long could they go on waiting like this, exhausted, starving, without food or light, and confined to this niche in the wall where they didn’t even dare move? But it was the darkness they found the hardest to bear, for it prevented them from observing the approach of death. There was deep silence. The bloated mine lay perfectly still; and all they could feel beneath them, swelling up from the roadways below, was the rising tide of its noiseless sea.
Hour followed upon black hour, though they could not tell how long it had been for their sense of time was now almost gone. Their torment should have made the minutes drag, but instead it made them race past. They thought they’d been trapped for only two days and one night whereas in reality they were coming to the end of their third day. They had given up all hope of being saved; nobody knew they were there – in any case nobody had the means to reach them – and hunger would finish them off even if the floodwater didn’t. They thought of tapping out the signal one last time, but the stone was under the water. In any case, who would hear them?
Catherine had leaned her aching head against the coal-seam in weary resignation when suddenly she gave a start:
‘Listen,’ she said.
At first Étienne thought she meant the faint sound of the rising water. So he lied, hoping to comfort her:
‘It’s only me. I was moving my legs.’
‘No, no, not that!…Further away. Listen.’
And she pressed her ear to the coal. He realized what she meant and did the same. They held their breath and waited for some seconds. Then, far away, very faintly, they heard three carefully spaced taps. But they still couldn’t believe it; perhaps their ears were making the noise, perhaps it was the rock shifting. And they didn’t know what they could use to answer with.
Étienne had an idea.
‘You’ve still got the clogs. Take them off and use the heels.’
She tapped out the miners’ signal; they listened, and once again, far away, they made out the sound of three taps. Twenty times they did it, and twenty times the reply came. They were crying and hugging each other, nearly falling off as they did so. The comrades were there at last, they were on their way. All memory of their anguished waiting and of the fury they had felt when their earlier tapping had