II

"Well, old man, get in!" said the miners. The moving windlass brought to

the mouth of the shaft the bucket in which the ore was brought up. The

rusty iron chain unrolled slowly with a harsh grating sound. Below the

darkness was so dense that one could not even perceive the reflection of

water which is always visible at the bottom of the deepest wells. Ivan

squatted down in the bucket.

"Now, in the name of God! you will turn round a bit, old man."

"It won't hurt him to swing a little," said others jokingly.

"Look, you fellows, we will get him down in the twinkling of an eye."

The windlass creaked, the rusty chain groaned plaintively, and the

bucket began to descend by jerks, knocking against the wooden lining of

the shaft with a metallic echo. Ivan raised his eyes; above him the

pit-mouth looked like a greyish patch, round him was impenetrable

darkness. The bucket turned with the chain and descended slowly. The

little lamp fastened to his waist cast trembling gleams on the damp

walls, and its light flickered timidly, hardly making visible the drops

of water which trickled across the wooden lining of the shaft; in fact

it seemed on the point of going out. Any one unused to such a descent

would at once have become giddy, but to old Ivan it seemed a mere

trifle. How often already he had thus descended and come up!

The walls of the shaft became more and more damp. Above, the grey patch

shrank and shrank. It seemed as though the day staring fixedly into the

darkness of the pit gradually closed its grey eye, baffled at its depth.

"Yes, this shaft is very old," thought the miner to himself; "I remember

the day it was sunk, and it must be quite sixty years ago, if I

recollect right. It is quite time to repair the lining; the wood has

decayed till it is black. I wonder how it can still hold together. Jesus

must certainly be watching over us. I am getting old too; they say I am

eighty-four. It is a lucky thing that they don't dismiss me, and only

give me easy work; otherwise I should starve, or at any rate be obliged

to beg."

Thoughts of all kinds passed through the old man's head. He was

accustomed to think much but never spoke. It was a long time since any

one had heard the sound of his voice, and it was thought that he had

forgotten how to speak because he had always lived surrounded by the

silence of the mine. The fact was that, hearing nothing but the sound

of his pickaxe, the noise of the ore being crushed, etc., he had lost

the habit of replying to questions. When any one spoke to him, he

quickly removed his leather cap, and answered by a bow so low that one

could see the top of his head adorned only by two locks of yellow hair.

People finished by leaving him in peace.

No one went so far as to ridicule him. He was, so to speak, one of the

curiosities of the mine, for it was known that he had been present at

its opening. The proprietors of the mine knew that in former days he was

always the first to go down, and that it was he who had loosened the

first yellow block from which the first piece of copper had been

extracted. All his contemporaries who were not dead had grown old around

him, and he himself, decrepit and bent, was still alive and even worked,

as far as his strength permitted.

"Old Ivan is a true miner; he was born in a gallery of the old mine,"

the workmen often said to one another. They had forgotten for a long

time past where the old worked-out mine which had been abandoned sixty

years ago was situated. His disuse of speech only augmented the respect

they felt for him. Some even thought that his silence was in consequence

of a vow. "He is Ivan the Silent," they would say. "Disbelieve it if

you like, but it is quite ten years since he has been silent."

Meanwhile the bucket suspended from the chain which rattled

remorselessly continued to descend. The greyish patch of the orifice was

no more visible at all, and its last vague glimmer had been swallowed up

in the damp cold darkness of the pit. The wooden lining had come to an

end, and the walls were formed of strata of different metals. On one

hand the sides and sharp edges of a great black stone projected, on the

other was damp mud encrusted with fragments of rock. Then the pale light

of the little lamp glided windingly over the rounded outlines of flint

fossils. It then zigzagged over a layer of brilliant white mineral,

which was soon succeeded by another of mud.

Through all--the earth, the flints, the edges of rent rocks--there

trickled innumerable water-drops. Was it the blood of the earth

escaping from a deep wound? Or was it shedding tears over the hard lot

of hundreds of men shut up in the eternal darkness of its mysterious

kingdom?

The tears fell thickly, one by one, forming threads of water, which in

their turn formed rivulets. Now the old man heard something else beside

the creaking of the rusted chain, every link of which seemed to be

complaining of extreme weariness, the result of long service. His ear,

accustomed to silence, caught the murmur of rivulets, and the noise of

water-drops, falling one by one, resembling the sound of grains of lead

falling on stone. Here is a spring which has escaped from its narrow

prison in the heart of the mountain and which forms a wide stream, but

which, finding on its escape from its long bondage only darkness as deep

as that of its prison, seems to moan as it glides over the damp stones.

The bucket continued its descent. He could no longer see above or below

him and the journey appeared interminable. The light of the little lamp,

which had nearly gone out, grew suddenly brighter. Around him

innumerable springs were trickling, running and descending on all sides.

Here and there uniting in large streams, they came down in cascades,

splashing Ivan's clothes. The darkness was full of the babbling, rushing

and noise of this water.

The old man knew that for sixty years it had been ceaselessly

undermining this shaft. Long ago, when he first went down it, only a few

drops of water used to filter through its sides. Later on these became

more numerous, and collecting together, finished by channelling for

themselves convenient passages and by flowing in streams. By this time

the work of destruction had become more and more threatening and the

earth was everywhere like a sponge. It seemed as though the springs

imprisoned in the mountain had found out the existence of this shaft and

had united to flow into it.

"They will certainly end by flooding the shaft," thought the old man.

"What is to be done? One can only hope in God. As long as He wills, the

shaft will exist, but as soon as He does not will it, it will be

destroyed from top to bottom."

Formerly the shaft was supported by the rocks, but the water had

succeeded in undermining them, sometimes by infiltration underneath

them, sometimes by dislodging them from their places and making them

lose their equilibrium; some of them projected through the walls of the

shaft and their sides were black with moisture. Presently these

undermined rocks would collapse, dragging down in their fall all the

surrounding earth. What a disaster it would be. The miners would be

buried alive like earth-worms. Only their feet would be visible, thought

the old man, as had been the case with his mother. "Entombed by the will

of God." It would be no use digging and trying to reach them; they would

be too far down; the shaft was three hundred fathoms deep and the whole

mine was dangerous. The walls of its galleries were as thin as those of

a bee-hive. So much ore had been extracted from it that entire caves had

been formed in the spongy earth. Whenever the shaft should collapse, the

walls of the galleries would not hold out any more, the whole mine would

fall in, and nothing would be left but an enormous cavity to show the

curious sightseer.

The old man regarded the prospect of such a collapse calmly, for to die

in a mine seemed to him quite natural as he had been born there. He

would have found it strange if his sad existence had ended on the

surface of the ground; on the other hand a death down here seemed quite

simple and natural. Here he felt at home. He remembered how when seized

with illness on one occasion, before he had become old, he had not even

ascended to the surface, but remained in the gallery where he worked all

the time, his comrades bringing him food. He had often passed the night

in his gallery stretched on comparatively soft ground. In old times he

had been often seized with a desire to ascend, to see again the sun and

the starry nights, but all that was now far away. Now he felt at home

here in this darkness where it was so warm and so comfortable, that,

but for the dampness, one would like to remain there always!

The water kept on coming down in resonant cascades. But in spite of

this, the old man distinctly heard not far off the blows of the miners'

innumerable pickaxes, the dull echoes of explosions in distant

galleries, and vague human noises. Here and there in the walls of the

shaft one saw black holes, once the entrances to ancient galleries which

had long ago been exhausted of their ore and abandoned.

The miners were now working in another stratum. But the old Ivan had not

forgotten these ancient galleries, for he had left in each of them a

little of his strength, and each of them had been moistened by his

perspiration. He rose and looked downwards; the flickerings of little

lamps like his own were visible, and vague sounds came up to him. The

gleam of water was also to be seen, for the bottom of the shaft was

entirely flooded. Pumps were no longer of any use to expel the water,

for pump as one might, the water kept pouring in. However, they had to

keep on pumping, for if they stopped, even for an hour, the whole mine

would have been flooded and the water would have rapidly penetrated all

the galleries, drowning the miners who were working in them.

"Earth and water--both are in the hands of God," said the miner to

himself.

The rusty chain ceased to unwind and the bucket stopped its descent

half-submerged in the water which covered the bottom of the shaft. The

miners ran up from all sides, holding their little lamps. "See who

comes!" they said with a laugh. "Good day, father!" They laid a plank

for him and helped him to get out. Then, as he always did, he removed

his cap and made a low bow to the miners, showing his bald head.

Numerous galleries diverged from this point in all directions, and their

darkness was pierced by little lights which ran hither and thither.

Sounds of voices were heard clearly as well as the noise of subterranean

explosions, but all other sounds were dominated by the roar of the

waters.

The old man re-lighted his little lamp, which had gone out, and stooping

forward, as though he were examining some mysterious footprints, he went

towards his gallery with unsteady steps.