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By Root 1549 0

the same black immensity that he had seen that morning when he had arrived in the middle of a gale. In front of him Le Voreux squatted like some evil beast, barely visible, dotted here and there with a few pinpricks of light from the lanterns. The three braziers up on the spoil-heap blazed away in mid-air like bloodshot moons, and from time to time the shadows of old Bonnemort and his yellow horse could be seen passing across them in enormous silhouette. Out on the bare and empty plain beyond, everything lay submerged in darkness: Montsou, Marchiennes, the forest of Vandame and the vast sea of beetfields and cornfields where, like distant lighthouses, the blast-furnaces with their flames of blue and the coke-ovens with their flames of red alone provided the last vestiges of light. Little by little the night crept in like a black flood. Rain had begun to fall now, slow, steady rain that blotted out the yawning darkness with its relentless streaming; and only one voice could still be heard, the long, slow gasps of the drainage-pump, panting, panting, night and day.

PART III

I

The next day, and on the days that followed, Étienne returned to work at the pit. He gradually became accustomed to it, and his life began to shape itself round this new form of labour and the novel routines which he had found so hard at the beginning. Only one episode of note interrupted the monotony of the first fortnight, a brief fever that kept him in bed for forty-eight hours with aching limbs and a throbbing head, during which time he kept having semi-delirious visions of pushing his tub along a road that was too narrow for his body to pass through. But this was simply the debilitating result of his apprenticeship, an excess of fatigue from which he soon recovered.

Days followed days; weeks and months went by. Now, like his comrades, he would get up at three in the morning, drink his coffee, and set off with the bread-and-butter sandwich that Mme Rasseneur had prepared the night before. As he walked to the pit he would regularly bump into old Bonnemort on his way home to bed, and in the afternoon he would pass Bouteloup coming in the opposite direction to begin his shift. Étienne had acquired his own cap, trousers and cotton jacket, and he too would shiver and warm his back at the roaring fire in the changing-room. Then there was the wait, barefoot, at the pit-head, with its howling draughts. He no longer noticed the winding-engine or its thick, brass-studded limbs of steel gleaming above him in the shadows, nor the cables that flitted up and down with the silent, black swoop of some nocturnal bird, nor the cages that rose and vanished in ceaseless succession amid the din of clanking signals, barked commands and tubs rumbling across the iron floor. His lamp wasn’t burning properly, the damned lamp-man must have forgotten to clean it; and he began to thaw only once Mouquet had got them all into the cages with a few laddish whacks on the bottom for the girls. The cage left its keeps and fell like a stone into a well without his so much as raising his head to catch a last glimpse of the light above. The thought of a possible crash never occurred to him now, and he felt at home as he descended into the darkness with the water raining down on top of him. After Pierron had unloaded them all at the bottom with his usual canting servility, the daily tramp of the herd began as each team of miners wearily headed off to its own coal-face. He could now find his way round the mine’s roads better than he could the streets of Montsou, and he knew where to turn, where to duck, where to step over a puddle. He was so familiar with these two kilometres underground that he could have walked them without a lamp and with his hands in his pockets. And each time there were the same encounters: a deputy shining his lamp in their faces, old Mouque fetching a horse, Bébert leading a snorting Battle, Jeanlin running along behind the train to shut the ventilation doors, a plump Mouquette or a skinny Lydie pushing their tubs.

In due course Étienne also began to suffer