Germinal - Emile Zola [54]
As Étienne was debating what to do, his eyes wandered over the immense plain and gradually began to take in what they saw. He was surprised, he hadn’t pictured a panorama like this when old Bonnemort had gestured towards it in the darkness. In front of him, certainly, he again saw Le Voreux, tucked away in a hollow with its buildings of brick and timber, its pitch-covered screening-shed, the headgear with its slate roof, the winding-house and the tall, pale-red chimney, all squatting there with a malevolent air. But the pit-yard spread out much further around the buildings than he had imagined, seemingly transformed into a pool of ink by the lapping waves of stockpiled coal. It was bristling with the tall trestles that carried the overhead rails, and at one end it was completely taken over by piles of timber, which lay there like the harvest from a forest newly razed to the ground. Over to the right, the view was obstructed by the spoil-heap, which looked like some colossal barricade placed there by giants. The oldest part of it was already covered in grass, while at the other end it was being eaten away by an internal fire, which had been smouldering for a year now and gave off a thick pall of smoke. Long rust-red streaks oozed like blood from its ghost-grey surface of sandstone and shale. Beyond it stretched the fields, endless fields of corn and beet, which were bare at this time of the year, and marshes covered in rough vegetation and punctuated with a few stunted willows, and then the distant meadows divided by thin rows of poplar. In the far distance, tiny patches of white indicated towns, Marchiennes to the north, Montsou to the south; while over to the east the forest of Vandame marked the edge of the horizon with the purple line of its denuded trees. And beneath the wan sky, in the dull light of a winter’s afternoon, it seemed as if all the blackness of Le Voreux and its swirling coal-dust had settled on the plain, like powder on the trees, like sand on the roads, like seed upon the earth.
As Étienne continued to gaze, what surprised him most was a canal, which he had not seen during the night. Constructed out of the river Scarpe, this canal ran in a straight line from Le Voreux to Marchiennes, a ribbon of matt silver some two leagues long. Like an avenue raised above the low-lying ground and lined with trees, it stretched away into the distance in an endless vista of green banks and pale water, of gliding barges and vermilion sterns. Next to the pit was a landing-stage where boats were moored ready to be filled directly from the tubs that ran along the overhead rails. There the canal took a sharp turn before cutting diagonally across the marshes; and this geometrically precise stretch of water seemed to represent the very soul of the empty plain, cutting across it like a major highway and bearing away its iron and coal.
Étienne’s gaze travelled from the canal back up to the village, which had been built on a plateau, but he could make out only the red tiles of the roofs. Then it moved back down towards Le Voreux and came to rest at the bottom of the muddy slope, lingering on two enormous piles of bricks which had been cast and baked on site. Here a branch of the Company’s railway line passed behind a fence and led into the pit. By now the last batch of stonemen would be going down. A solitary wagon being pushed by some workmen gave a piercing screech. But the