ng excavation which he was
making under the coal. The working was low, you must stoop all the
time. The roof and the timbered sides of the way seemed to press on
you. It was as if she were in her tomb for ever, like the dead and
everlasting Egyptians. She was frightened, but fascinated. The
collier kept on talking to her, stretching his bare, grey-black
hairy arm across her vision, and pointing with his knotted hand. The
thick-wicked tallow candles guttered and smelled. There was a
thickness in the air, a sense of dark, fluid presence in the thick
atmosphere, the dark, fluid, viscous voice of the collier making a
broad-vowelled, clapping sound in her ear. He seemed to linger near
her as if he knew--as if he knew--what? Something for ever
unknowable and inadmissible, something that belonged purely to the
underground: to the slaves who work underground: knowledge
humiliated, subjected, but ponderous and inevitable. And still his
voice went on clapping in her ear, and still his presence edged near
her, and seemed to impinge on her--a smallish, semi-grotesque,
grey-obscure figure with a naked brandished forearm: not human: a
creature of the subterranean world, melted out like a bat, fluid.
She felt herself melting out also, to become a mere vocal ghost, a
presence in the thick atmosphere. Her lungs felt thick and slow, her
mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long
swoon of the crannied, underworld darkness. Cling like a bat and
sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness--

When she was up on the earth again she blinked and peered at the
world in amazement. What a pretty, luminous place it was, carved in
substantial luminosity. What a strange and lovely place, bubbling
iridescent-golden on the surface of the underworld. Iridescent
golden--could anything be more fascinating! Like lovely glancing
surface on fluid pitch. But a velvet surface. A velvet surface of
golden light, velvet-pile of gold and pale luminosity, and strange
beautiful elevations of houses and trees, and depressions of fields
and roads, all golden and floating like atmospheric majolica. Never
had the common ugliness of Woodhouse seemed so entrancing. She
thought she had never seen such beauty--a lovely luminous majolica,
living and palpitating, the glossy, svelte world-surface, the
exquisite face of all the darkness. It was like a vision. Perhaps
gnomes and subterranean workers, enslaved in the era of light, see
with such e