accursed
tubs still rattle by on the tramways. The roof throws back their noises,
and when all the place is full of a grumbling and a growling, how under
earth is one to know whence danger will turn up next? The air brings to
the unacclimatised a singing in the ears, a hotness of the eyeballs,
and a jumping of the heart. "That's because the pressure here is
different from the pressure up above. It'll wear off in a minute. _We_
don't notice it. Wait till you get down a four-hundred-foot pit. _Then_
your ears will begin to sing, if you like."

Most people know the One Night of each hot weather--that still, clouded
night just before the Rains break, when there seems to be no more
breathable air under the bowl of the pitiless skies, and all the weight
of the silent, dark house lies on the chest of the sleep-hunter. This is
the feeling in a coal-mine--only more so--much more so, for the darkness
is the "gross darkness of the inner sepulchre." It is hard to see which
is the black coal and which the passage driven through it. From far
away, down the side galleries, comes the regular beat of the pick--thick
and muffled as the beat of the labouring heart. "Six men to a gang, and
they aren't allowed to work alone. They make six-foot drives through the
coal--two and sometimes three men working together. The rest clear away
the stuff and load it into the tubs. We have no props in this gallery
because we have a roof as good as a ceiling. The coal lies under the
sandstone here. It's beautiful sandstone." It _was_ beautiful
sandstone--as hard as a billiard table and devoid of any nasty little
bumps and jags.

There was a roaring down one road--the roaring of infernal fires. This
is not a pleasant thing to hear in the dark. It is too suggestive.
"That's our ventilating shaft. Can't you feel the air getting brisker?
Come and look."

Imagine a great iron-bound crate of burning coal, hanging over a gulf
of darkness faintly showing the brickwork of the base of a chimney.
"We're at the bottom of the shaft. That fire makes a draught that sucks
up the foul air from the bottom of the pit. There's another down-draw
shaft in another part of the mine where the clean air comes in. We
aren't going to set the mines on fire. There's an earth and brick floor
at the bottom of the pit; the crate hangs over. It isn't so deep as you
think." Then a devil--a naked devil--came in with a pitchfork and fed
the spouting flames. This was perfectly in keeping