l
have urged me to lift up the rock. I could do nothing but sit down and
lean fainting against the rocks. This arose entirely from the badness
of the air. After a time I felt a trifle better, and then I climbed
one short ladder, and sat down very faint again. When I recovered, two
men tied a rope round me, and went up the ladder before me, supporting
a part of my weight, and in this way I ascended four or five ladders
(with long rests between) till we came to a level, 260 fathoms below
the adit or nearly 300 fathoms below the surface, where there was a
tolerable current of pretty good air. Here I speedily recovered,
though I was a little weak for a short time afterwards. George also
felt the bad air a good deal, but not so much as I. He descended to
some workings equally low in another place (towards which the party
that I spoke of were directing their works), but said that the air
there was by no means so bad. We all met at the bottom of the
man-engine 260 fathoms below the adit. We sat still a little while,
and I acquired sufficient strength and nerve, so that I did not feel
the slightest alarm in the operation of ascending by the
man-engine. This is the funniest operation that I ever saw: it is the
only absolute novelty that I have seen since I was in the country
before: it has been introduced 2-1/2 years in Tresavean, and one day
in the United Mines. In my last letter I described the principle. In
the actual use there is no other motion to be made by the person who
is ascending or descending than that of stepping sideways each time
(there being proper hand-holds) with no exertion at all, except that
of stepping exactly at the proper instant: and not the shadow of
unpleasant feeling in the motion. Any woman may go with the most
perfect comfort, if she will but attend to the rules of stepping, and
forget that there is an open pit down to the very bottom of the
mine. In this way we were pumped up to the surface, and came up as
cool as cucumbers, instead of being drenched with perspiration. In my
description in last letter I forgot to mention that between the stages
on the moving rods which I have there described there are intermediate
stages on the moving rods (for which there is ample room, inasmuch as
the interval between the stages on each rod used by one person is 24
feet), and these intermediate stages are used by persons _descending_:
so that there are persons _ascending_ and persons _descending_ at the
same time