Germinal - Emile Zola [31]
‘Mind out!’ shouted three banksmen who were dragging a gigantic ladder.
Étienne had almost been crushed. His eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness, and he watched the cables as they vanished upwards, more than thirty metres of steel ribbon rising straight up into the headgear and over the winding-pulleys before plunging back down into the mine-shaft to connect with the cages. A cast-iron frame, like the beams in the roof of a bell-tower, supported the pulleys. With the noiseless, unimpeded swoop of a bird, the cable – which was enormously heavy and could lift up to one thousand two hundred kilograms at a speed of ten metres per second – pursued its rapid, ceaseless course, up and down, up and down.
‘Mind out, for Christ’s sake!’ the banksmen shouted again, as they raised the ladder on the other side of the engine to inspect the left-hand pulley.
Slowly Étienne turned back towards the pit-head. The spectacle of this giant swooping above his head made him feel dizzy; and, still shivering in the draughts, he watched the cages come and go, deafened by the rumble of the coal-tubs. Next to the shaft was the signal, a heavy hammer on a lever attached to a rope which, when pulled from below, caused the hammer to fall on a block. Once to stop, twice to descend, three times to come up: it never stopped, great cudgel-blows that could be heard above the din, accompanied by the bright ring of a bell. Meanwhile the banksman in charge added to the general racket by shouting orders to the engineman through a loudhailer. Amid all this commotion the cages rose and vanished, emptied and filled, leaving Étienne none the wiser as to the whys and wherefores of these complex manœuvres.
One thing he did grasp: the pit could swallow people in mouthfuls of twenty or thirty at a time, and with such ease that it seemed not even to notice the moment of their consumption. The miners began descending at four. They arrived barefoot from the changing-room, each carrying a lamp, and waited in small groups until there was a sufficient number. Without a sound, springing gently up from below like some creature of the night, the cage would emerge from the darkness and lock into its keeps, each of its four decks containing two tubs full of coal. Banksmen on each deck would drag the tubs out and replace them with others, which were either empty or already loaded with timber props. And the workers would pile into the empty tubs, five at a time, up to a maximum of forty. An order would issue from the loudhailer in the form of a muffled, unintelligible bellow, while the signal-rope was pulled four times to indicate a ‘meat load’, warning those below that a cargo of human flesh was on its way down. Then, after a slight jolt, the cage would plummet silently below, falling like a stone and leaving only the quivering trail of its cable.
‘Is it a long way down?’ Étienne asked a sleepy-looking miner who was waiting beside him.
‘Five hundred and fifty-four metres,’ the man replied. ‘But there are four loading-bays on the way down. The first one’s at three hundred and twenty metres.’
They both fell silent, gazing at the cable which was now coming back up.
‘And what if that breaks?’
‘Ah well, if that breaks…’
The miner gestured by way of an answer. It was his turn now, the cage having reappeared with its usual, tireless ease. He squatted in a tub with some of his comrades, down the cage went, and up it came again scarcely four minutes later, ready to devour a further load of humans. For half an hour the shaft continued to gorge itself in this way, with greater or lesser voracity depending on the level to which the men were descending, but without cease, ever famished, its giant bowels capable of digesting an entire people. It filled and it filled,