Germinal - Emile Zola [278]
‘How about that!’ she exclaimed happily. ‘Lucky I leaned my head when I did!’
‘That’s some hearing you’ve got!’ he replied. ‘I didn’t hear a thing.’
From then on they took it in turns so that one of them was always listening and ready to reply to the slightest signal. Soon they could hear the sound of picks: they must be beginning to cut a way through to them, they must be sinking a new shaft. Not a sound escaped them. But their elation subsided. Try as they might to put on a brave face for each other, they were beginning to lose hope again. At first they had discussed the situation endlessly: it was clear the men were coming from Réquillart, they were digging down through the seam, perhaps they were making three shafts, because there were always three men digging. But then they began to talk less and eventually relapsed into silence when they considered the enormous mass of rock separating them from the comrades. They pursued their thoughts in silence, calculating the days upon days it would take someone to bore through so much rock. The men would never reach them in time, they could both have died twenty times over by then. Not daring to say anything to each other as their own anguish increased, they gloomily answered the calls by drumming out their signal with the clogs, not in hope but out of an instinctive need to let people know that they were still alive.
Another day passed, and then another. They had now been down there for six days. The water, having reached their knees, was neither rising nor falling; and their legs felt as though they were dissolving in its icy bath. They could lift them out for an hour or so, but it was so uncomfortable sitting in this position that they suffered terrible cramp and were forced to put them back. Every ten minutes they had to wriggle their bottoms back up the slippery rock. Jagged fragments of coal dug into their backs, and they had a permanent sharp pain at the tops of their spines from bowing their heads all the time to avoid the rock above. The atmosphere was becoming more and more suffocating, since the water had compressed the air into the sort of bubble they were sitting in. The sound of their voices, muffled therefore, seemed to come from a long way away. Their ears started buzzing with strange noises: they would hear bells ringing madly or what sounded like a herd of animals galloping through an endless hailstorm.
At first Catherine suffered horribly from the lack of food. She would press her poor clenched fists to her throat, and her breath came in long, wheezing, ear-splitting moans as if her stomach were being removed by forceps. Étienne, racked by the same torture, was groping round desperately in the dark when, right next to him, his fingers came on a piece of half-rotten timber, which he broke up with his nails. He gave Catherine a handful, which she devoured greedily. For two days they lived off this mouldy piece of wood; they ate the whole thing and were in despair when they finished it, scratching away till their fingers were raw in the attempt to start on other bits of wood that were still sound and whose fibres refused to give. Their torment grew worse, and they were furious to find that they couldn’t eat the material of their clothes. Étienne’s leather belt brought a modicum of relief: he bit off little pieces for her, which she chewed to a pulp and tried her hardest to swallow. It gave their jaws something to do while affording them the illusion of eating. Then, when the belt was finished, they started to chew their clothes again, sucking them for hours on end.
But soon these violent cramps passed, and their hunger was no more than a dull pain deep inside them, the sensation that their strength was slowly and gradually ebbing out of them. They would no doubt have died already if they had not had as much water as they wanted. They had only to bend over and drink from their cupped hands;