with the landscape.

More trucks, more muffled noises, more darkness made visible, and more
devils--male and female--coming out of darkness and vanishing. Then a
picture to be remembered. A great Hall of Eblis, twenty feet from
inky-black floor to grey roof, upheld by huge pillars of shining coal,
and filled with flitting and passing devils. On a shattered pillar near
the roof stood a naked man, his flesh olive-coloured in the light of the
lamps, hewing down a mass of coal that still clove to the roof. Behind
him was the wall of darkness, and when the lamps shifted he disappeared
like a ghost. The devils were shouting directions, and the man howled in
reply, resting on his pick and wiping the sweat from his brow. When he
smote the coal crushed and slid and rumbled from the darkness into the
darkness, and the devils cried _Shabash!_ The man stood erect like a
bronze statue, he twisted and bent himself like a Japanese grotesque,
and anon threw himself on his side after the manner of the dying
gladiator. Then spoke the still small voice of fact: "A first-class
workman if he would only stick to it. But as soon as he makes a little
money he lies off and spends it. That's the last of a pillar that we've
knocked out. See here. These pillars of coal are square, about thirty
feet each way. As you can see, we make the pillar first by cutting out
all the coal between. Then we drive two square tunnels, about seven feet
wide, through and across the pillar, propping it with balks. There's one
fresh cut."

Two tunnels crossing at right angles had been driven through a pillar
which in its under-cut condition seemed like the rough draft of a statue
for an elephant. "When the pillar stands only on four legs we chip away
one leg at a time from a square to an hour-glass shape, and then either
the whole of the pillar crashes down from the roof or else a quarter or
a half. If the coal lies against the sandstones it carries away clear,
but in some places it brings down stone and rubbish with it. The
chipped-away legs of the pillars are called stooks."

"Who has to make the last cut that breaks a leg through?"

"Oh! Englishmen of sorts. We can't trust natives for the job unless it's
very easy. The natives take kindly to the pillar-work though. They are
paid just as much for their coal as though they had hewed it out of the
solid. Of course we take very good care to see that the roof doesn't
come in on us. You would never understand how and