Silence in which they lay, all, all, so fixed and veteran; and at one
time I fell a-staring, nearer perhaps to death and the empty Gulf than
I knew; but I said I would be strong, and not sink into their habit of
stillness, but let them keep to their own way, and follow their own
fashion, and I would keep to my own way, and follow my own fashion, nor
yield to them, though I was but one against many; and I roused myself
with a shudder; and setting to work, caught hold of the drum-chain of a
long gugg, and planting my feet in the chogg-holes in which rested the
wheels of the putt-carriages that used to come roaring down the gugg, I
got up, stooping under a roof only three feet high, till I came, near
the end of the ascent, upon the scene of another battle: for in this
gugg about fifteen of the mine-hands had clubbed to wall themselves in,
and had done it, and I saw them lie there all by themselves through the
broken cement, with their bare feet, trousers, naked bodies all black,
visage all fierce and wild, the grime still streaked with sweat-furrows,
the candle in their rimless hats, and, outside, their own 'getting'
mattocks and boring-irons to besiege them. From the bottom of this gugg
I went along a very undulating twin-way, into which, every thirty yards
or so, opened one of those steep putt-ways which they called topples,
the twin-ways having plates of about 2-1/2 ft. gauge for the putts from
the headings, or workings, above to come down upon, full of coal and
shale: and all about here, in twin-way and topples, were ends and
corners, and not one had been left without its walling-in, and only one
was then intact, some, I fancied, having been broken open by their own
builders at the spur of suffocation, or hunger; and the one intact I
broke into with a mattock--it was only a thin cake of plaster, but
air-tight--and in a space not seven feet long behind it I found the very
ill-smelling corpse of a carting-boy, with guss and tugger at his feet,
and the pad which protected his head in pushing the putts, and a great
heap of loaves, sardines, and bottled beer against the walls, and five
or six mice that suddenly pitched screaming through the opening which I
made, greatly startling me, there being of dead mice an extraordinary
number in all this mine-region. I went back to the standing, and at one
point in the ground, where there was a windlass and chain, lowered
myself down a 'cut'--a small pit sunk perpendicularly to a lower