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By Root 1565 0

In order to see what he was doing he had to hang his lamp from a nail, just by his head; and the continued heat of the lamp on his skull eventually raised his body temperature to fever level. But it was the wetness that made life particularly difficult. The rock above him, just a few centimetres from his face, was streaming with water, and large drops of it would keep falling in regular, rapid succession, always landing with stubborn insistence on exactly the same spot. Try as he might to twist his neck or bend his head back, they splattered remorselessly against his face and burst. After a quarter of an hour he would be soaked through, and with his body also bathed in sweat he steamed like a wash-tub. That particular morning a drop of water was continually hitting him in the eye, and it made him curse. He didn’t want to stop hewing, and as he continued to hack fiercely at the rock, his body shook violently in the narrow space, like a greenfly caught between the leaves of a book and about to be squashed completely flat.

Not a word was exchanged. Everyone was tapping away, and all that could be heard was the irregular clunk-clunk of the picks, which seemed to come from far away. There were no echoes in this airless place, and sounds were more like a dull rasping. The darkness itself seemed to consist of an unfamiliar blackness that was thick with flying coal-dust and filled with gases that made the eyelids heavy. The wicks in the lamps were no more than reddish pinpricks of light beneath their gauze mantles. One could see almost nothing, and the coal-face simply rose into a pitch-black void, like a broad, flat, sloping chimney piled high with the soot of a dozen winters. Ghostly shapes moved about in it, and chance gleams of light picked out the curve of a hip, or a sinewy arm, or a wild-looking face blackened as though in readiness for a crime. From time to time, lumps of coal would gleam in the darkness as they came away, suddenly illuminated – a flat surface here, a sharp edge there – by the glint of light on crystal. Then it would all be dark again, and apart from the loud thudding of the picks all that could be heard were gasping lungs and the occasional groan of discomfort and fatigue caused by the thick air and the water raining down from the underground springs.

Zacharie was not feeling strong – the consequence of a heavy night – and he soon stopped hewing on the pretext that some timbering needed to be done, which meant he could take it easy for a while and whistle softly to himself as he stared absently into space. Behind the hewers nearly three metres of the seam had been dug out and still they had not taken the precaution of shoring up the rock, being at once careless of the danger and jealous of their time.

‘Hey, you there, with your nose in the air!’ Zacharie called to Étienne. ‘Pass me some props.’

Étienne, who was being taught by Catherine how best to use his shovel, had to carry the props to the coal-face. There was a small amount left over from the day before, the usual practice being to bring down each morning some that had been cut exactly to the dimensions of the seam.

‘Come on, hurry up, you lazy bastard!’ Zacharie continued, as he watched the new putter hoist himself awkwardly up through the loose coal with his arms full of four lengths of oak.

With his pick he cut a notch in the roof and another in the wall, and then wedged the two ends of the beam in place so that they served as a support. Each afternoon the shifters came and fetched the rubble left at the end of each tunnel by the hewers and then disposed of it in the cavities where the seam had already been mined. They made no effort to remove the timbering, and simply kept the uppermost and lowermost roads free for haulage.

Maheu stopped grunting. He had finally managed to prise out his block of coal. He wiped his streaming face on his sleeve and began to concern himself with what Zacharie had climbed up behind him to do.

‘No, leave that for now,’ he said. ‘We’ll see about it after lunch…Better we keep hewing if we want to fill our usual