Germinal - Emile Zola [36]
On they trudged. Presently they came to a crossroads, where two further roadways led off, and the group divided again as the miners gradually dispersed among the various workings in the mine. Here the haulage roadway was timbered: oak props supported the roof and retained the crumbling rock behind a wooden framework through which one could see the layers of shale sparkling with mica and the solid mass of dull, rough sandstone. Trains of tubs went by all the time, full or empty, thundering past each other before being borne off into the darkness by phantom beasts at a ghostly trot. On a double track in a siding a long black snake lay sleeping: it was a stationary train, and its horse snorted in the darkness, which was so thick that the dim outline of the horse’s quarters looked like a lump of rock that had fallen from the roof. Ventilation doors opened with a bang and then slowly closed again. As they walked on, the roadway gradually got narrower and lower, and they kept having to stoop to pass beneath its uneven roof.
Étienne banged his head, hard. Without his leather cap he would have split his skull. And yet he had been keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Maheu in front of him, following his every movement as his dark shape loomed against the light of the lamps beyond. None of the miners banged their heads, since each of them no doubt knew every bump along the way, whether it was a knot in the wood or a bulge in the rock. Étienne also found the slippery ground difficult, and it was getting wetter and wetter. From time to time they crossed what were virtually pools of water, as they could tell from the muddy squelch of their feet. But what surprised him most of all were the sudden changes in temperature. At the bottom of the shaft it had been very cold, and in the haulage roadway – through which all the air in the mine passed – an icy wind blew, whipped to a storm by the narrowness of the space between the walls. Then, as they penetrated deeper into the other roads, which each received only a meagre ration of air, the wind dropped and the temperature rose, to the point where the air became suffocatingly hot and as heavy as lead.
Maheu had made no further comment. He turned right into another roadway, simply saying ‘the Guillaume seam’ to Étienne but without bothering to turn round.
This was the seam where they were working one of the coal-faces. A few steps further and Étienne banged his head and elbows. The roof now sloped down so low that they had to walk for whole stretches of twenty or thirty metres bent double. Water came up to their ankles. They continued on for two hundred metres like this; and then suddenly Étienne saw Levaque, Zacharie and Catherine disappear, as though they had vanished through a thin cleft in the rock in front of him.
‘We have to climb,’ Maheu continued. ‘Hang your lamp from your buttonhole and grab hold of the timbering.’
He, too, vanished, and Étienne was obliged to follow. A kind of chimney had been left in the seam so that the miners could reach all the subsidiary roads. It was the same width as the coal-seam itself, scarcely sixty centimetres. Fortunately the young man was slim, for being as yet unpractised it took him an excessive amount of muscular effort to hoist himself aloft, which he did by squeezing his shoulders and hips in tight, then clinging to the timbers and dragging himself up by his wrists. Fifteen metres up they came on the first of the secondary roads; but they had to keep going because the face worked by Maheu and his team was the sixth road in ‘Hell’, as they called it. At intervals of fifteen metres came further roads, each one running exactly above the last; and the climb seemed never-ending as they scrambled up through this crack in the rock and felt the skin being scraped off their backs and their chests.