for anything: I saw the lamp-light struggle, the dead cheeks
quiver, I heard the cage-shoes go singing down the wire-rope guides,
and quicker we went, and quicker, that facile descent of Avernus,
slipping lightly, then raging, with sparks at the shoes and guides, and
a hurricane in my ears and eyes and mouth. When we bumped upon the
'dogs' at the bottom, I was tossed a foot upwards with the stern-faced
others, and then lay among them in the eight-foot space without
consciousness.

It was only when I sat, an hour later, disgustedly reflecting on this
incident, that I remembered that there was always some 'hand-working' of
the engine during the cage-descents, an engineman reversing the action
by a handle at every stroke of the piston, to prevent bumping. However,
the only permanent injury was to the lamp: and I found many others
inside.

I got out into the coal-hole, a large black hall 70 feet square by 15
high, the floor paved with iron sheets; there were some little holes
round the wall, dug for some purpose which I never could discover, some
waggons full of coal and shale standing about, and all among the
waggons, and on them, and under them, bodies, clothes. I got a new lamp,
pouring in my own oil, and went down a long steep ducky-road, very
rough, with numerous rollers, over which ran a rope to the pit-mouth
for drawing up the waggons; and in the sides here, at regular intervals,
man-holes, within which to rescue one's self from down-tearing waggons;
and within these man-holes, here and there, a dead, and in others every
sort of food, and at one place on the right a high dead heap, and the
air here hot at 64 or 65 degrees, and getting hotter with the descent.

The ducky led me down into a standing--a space with a turn-table--of
unusual size, which I made my base of operations for exploring. Here was
a very considerable number of punt-shaped putts on carriages, and also
waggons, such as took the new-mined coal from putt to pit-mouth; and
raying out from this open standing, several avenues, some ascending as
guggs, some descending as dipples, and the dead here all arranged in
groups, the heads of this group pointing up this gugg, of that group
toward that twin-way, of that other down that dipple, and the central
space, where weighing was done, almost empty: and the darksome silence
of this deep place, with all these multitudes, I found extremely
gravitating and hypnotic, drawing me, too, into their great Passion of