Germinal - Emile Zola [35]
‘The shaft’s four metres across,’ Maheu continued to inform him. ‘It could do with being retubbed, the water’s coming in everywhere…Listen! We’re just getting there now. Can you hear it?’
Étienne had indeed just begun to wonder why it sounded as though it were raining. At first a few heavy drops of water had splattered on to the cage roof, as though a shower were beginning; and now the rain was falling faster, streaming down in a veritable deluge. Presumably the roof must have had a hole in it because a trickle of water had landed on his shoulder and soaked him to the skin. It was becoming icy cold, and they were plunging down into the damp and the dark when suddenly they passed through a blaze of light and caught a flashing glimpse of a cave with men moving about. Already they had resumed their descent into the void.
Maheu was saying:
‘That was the first level. We’re three hundred and twenty metres down now…Look at the speed.’
He raised his lamp and shone it on to one of the beams that guided the cages; it was tearing past like a railway line beneath a train travelling at full speed. But still that was all they could see. Three more levels flashed past in a startled burst of light. The deafening rain continued to teem down in the darkness.
‘My God, it’s deep,’ Étienne muttered under his breath.
It was as if they had been falling like this for hours. He was suffering from the awkward position he’d taken up in the tub, and especially from the painful presence of Catherine’s elbow, but he didn’t dare move. She didn’t say a word; he could simply feel her next to him, warming him. When the cage finally reached the bottom, five hundred and fifty-four metres down, he was astonished to learn that the descent had taken exactly one minute. But the sound of the cage locking into its keeps and the accompanying sense of having something solid underfoot made him suddenly euphoric; and he joked familiarly with Catherine:
‘What have you got under there that keeps you so warm?…I hope that’s only your elbow that’s sticking into my ribs!’
It was her turn to speak frankly. After all, what a stupid idiot he was, still thinking she was a boy! Couldn’t he see straight?
‘Or making you go blind, more like!’ she replied, which provoked a gale of laughter that left an astonished Étienne completely at a loss.
The cage was emptying, and the miners crossed pit-bottom, a cavity hewn out of the rock, which was reinforced with masonry vaults and lit by three large, open lamps. The onsetters were busy wheeling the full tubs roughly across the cast-iron flooring. A smell of cellars oozed from the walls, a cool, damp reek of saltpetre mixed with the occasional waft of warmth from the nearby stable. Four roadways led off from this point, their mouths gaping.
‘This way,’ Maheu told Étienne. ‘We’re not there yet. We’ve still got a good two kilometres to go.’
The miners split up into groups and vanished into these four black holes. Fifteen of them had just entered the one on the left; and Étienne followed, walking behind Maheu, who was behind Catherine, Zacharie and Levaque. It was an excellent haulage roadway running at right angles to the seam and hollowed out of such solid rock that it had needed very little timbering. Along they walked in single file, on and on, silently, by the tiny light of their lamps. Étienne kept tripping over the rails. For a little while now a particular muffled sound had been worrying him, the distant tumult of a storm rising from the bowels of the earth and which seemed to be getting increasingly violent. Did this thunderous rumbling presage a rock-fall that was going to bring the huge mass of earth overhead crashing down on them all? A patch of light pierced the darkness, he felt the rock vibrate, and, having