Germinal (11 page)

‘We're away,' Maheu said simply.

Everyone was calm. Occasionally Étienne wondered if he was going up or down. There were moments when they seemed not to be moving at all as the cage went straight down without touching the guides on either side; and then suddenly these wooden beams would start vibrating, as though they had come loose, and he would be afraid that some disaster was about to strike. As it was, he couldn't see the sides of the shaft even though his face was pressed to the mesh of the cage. The bodies huddled at his feet were barely visible in the light from the Davy lamps. Only the deputy's open lamp, in the next tub, shone out like a lighthouse.

‘The shaft's four metres across,' Maheu continued to inform him. ‘It could do with being retubbed, the water's coming in everywhere…Listen! We're just getting there now. Can you hear it?'

Étienne had indeed just begun to wonder why it sounded as though it were raining. At first a few heavy drops of water had splattered on to the cage roof, as though a shower were beginning; and now the rain was falling faster, streaming down in a veritable deluge. Presumably the roof must have had a hole in it because a trickle of water had landed on his shoulder and soaked him to the skin. It was becoming icy cold, and they were plunging down into the damp and the dark when suddenly they passed through a blaze of light and caught a flashing glimpse of a cave with men moving about. Already they had resumed their descent into the void.

Maheu was saying:

‘That was the first level. We're three hundred and twenty metres down now…Look at the speed.'

He raised his lamp and shone it on to one of the beams that guided the cages; it was tearing past like a railway line beneath
a train travelling at full speed. But still that was all they could see. Three more levels flashed past in a startled burst of light. The deafening rain continued to teem down in the darkness.

‘My God, it's deep,' Étienne muttered under his breath.

It was as if they had been falling like this for hours. He was suffering from the awkward position he'd taken up in the tub, and especially from the painful presence of Catherine's elbow, but he didn't dare move. She didn't say a word; he could simply feel her next to him, warming him. When the cage finally reached the bottom, five hundred and fifty-four metres down, he was astonished to learn that the descent had taken exactly one minute. But the sound of the cage locking into its keeps and the accompanying sense of having something solid underfoot made him suddenly euphoric; and he joked familiarly with Catherine:

‘What have you got under there that keeps you so warm?…I hope that's only your elbow that's sticking into my ribs!'

It was her turn to speak frankly. After all, what a stupid idiot he was, still thinking she was a boy! Couldn't he see straight?

‘Or making you go blind, more like!' she replied, which provoked a gale of laughter that left an astonished Étienne completely at a loss.

The cage was emptying, and the miners crossed pit-bottom, a cavity hewn out of the rock, which was reinforced with masonry vaults and lit by three large, open lamps. The onsetters were busy wheeling the full tubs roughly across the cast-iron flooring. A smell of cellars oozed from the walls, a cool, damp reek of saltpetre mixed with the occasional waft of warmth from the nearby stable. Four roadways led off from this point, their mouths gaping.

‘This way,' Maheu told Étienne. ‘We're not there yet. We've still got a good two kilometres to go.'

The miners split up into groups and vanished into these four black holes. Fifteen of them had just entered the one on the left; and Étienne followed, walking behind Maheu, who was behind Catherine, Zacharie and Levaque. It was an excellent haulage roadway running at right angles to the seam and hollowed out of such solid rock that it had needed very little timbering. Along they walked in single file, on and on, silently, by the tiny light
of their lamps. Étienne kept tripping over the rails. For a little while now a particular muffled sound had been worrying him, the distant tumult of a storm rising from the bowels of the earth and which seemed to be getting increasingly violent. Did this thunderous rumbling presage a rock-fall that was going to bring the huge mass of earth overhead crashing down on them all? A patch of light pierced the darkness, he felt the rock vibrate, and, having pressed his back flat to the wall, like his comrades, he saw a large white horse go past his face, pulling a train of coal-tubs. On the first tub, holding the reins, sat Bébert, while Jeanlin ran barefoot behind the last, hanging on to its rim with both hands.

On they trudged. Presently they came to a crossroads, where two further roadways led off, and the group divided again as the miners gradually dispersed among the various workings in the mine. Here the haulage roadway was timbered: oak props supported the roof and retained the crumbling rock behind a wooden framework through which one could see the layers of shale sparkling with mica and the solid mass of dull, rough sandstone. Trains of tubs went by all the time, full or empty, thundering past each other before being borne off into the darkness by phantom beasts at a ghostly trot. On a double track in a siding a long black snake lay sleeping: it was a stationary train, and its horse snorted in the darkness, which was so thick that the dim outline of the horse's quarters looked like a lump of rock that had fallen from the roof. Ventilation doors opened with a bang and then slowly closed again. As they walked on, the roadway gradually got narrower and lower, and they kept having to stoop to pass beneath its uneven roof.

Étienne banged his head, hard. Without his leather cap he would have split his skull. And yet he had been keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Maheu in front of him, following his every movement as his dark shape loomed against the light of the lamps beyond. None of the miners banged their heads, since each of them no doubt knew every bump along the way, whether it was a knot in the wood or a bulge in the rock. Étienne also found the slippery ground difficult, and it was getting wetter and wetter. From time to time they crossed what were virtually
pools of water, as they could tell from the muddy squelch of their feet. But what surprised him most of all were the sudden changes in temperature. At the bottom of the shaft it had been very cold, and in the haulage roadway – through which all the air in the mine passed – an icy wind blew, whipped to a storm by the narrowness of the space between the walls. Then, as they penetrated deeper into the other roads, which each received only a meagre ration of air, the wind dropped and the temperature rose, to the point where the air became suffocatingly hot and as heavy as lead.

Maheu had made no further comment. He turned right into another roadway, simply saying ‘the Guillaume seam' to Étienne but without bothering to turn round.

This was the seam where they were working one of the coal-faces. A few steps further and Étienne banged his head and elbows. The roof now sloped down so low that they had to walk for whole stretches of twenty or thirty metres bent double. Water came up to their ankles. They continued on for two hundred metres like this; and then suddenly Étienne saw Levaque, Zacharie and Catherine disappear, as though they had vanished through a thin cleft in the rock in front of him.

‘We have to climb,' Maheu continued. ‘Hang your lamp from your buttonhole and grab hold of the timbering.'

He, too, vanished, and Étienne was obliged to follow. A kind of chimney had been left in the seam so that the miners could reach all the subsidiary roads. It was the same width as the coal-seam itself, scarcely sixty centimetres. Fortunately the young man was slim, for being as yet unpractised it took him an excessive amount of muscular effort to hoist himself aloft, which he did by squeezing his shoulders and hips in tight, then clinging to the timbers and dragging himself up by his wrists. Fifteen metres up they came on the first of the secondary roads; but they had to keep going because the face worked by Maheu and his team was the sixth road in ‘Hell', as they called it. At intervals of fifteen metres came further roads, each one running exactly above the last; and the climb seemed never-ending as they scrambled up through this crack in the rock and felt the skin being scraped off their backs and their chests. Étienne was
gasping for breath, as if the weight of the rock had crushed his limbs; his legs were bruised, his hands felt as though they had been torn from his arms, but above all he was desperate for air, to such an extent that his blood felt as though it were ready to burst from his veins. Dimly, in one of the roads, he made out the hunched shapes of two animals, one small and one large, pushing coal-tubs: it was Lydie and La Mouquette, already at work. And still he had the height of two coal-faces to climb! He was blinded by sweat and despaired of keeping pace with the others as he heard their supple limbs slithering smoothly up the surface of the rock.

‘Keep going, we're there!' he heard Catherine say.

But as indeed he reached the spot, another voice shouted from the coal-face:

‘What the hell's this, then? Some kind of joke or what? I have to come a whole two kilometres from Montsou, and I'm bloody here first!'

This was Chaval, a tall, thin, bony man of twenty-five with strong features. He was cross at having had to wait. When he caught sight of Étienne, he asked in scornful surprise:

‘And what have we got here, then?'

When Maheu had told him what had happened, he added through clenched teeth:

‘So now the boys are stealing the girls' bread out of their mouths.'
¹

The two men exchanged a look, their eyes blazing with the kind of instinctive hatred that flares in an instant. Étienne had sensed the insult, but without yet fully understanding its meaning. There was a silence, and everyone set to work. All the seams had gradually filled up, and all the faces were being worked, on each level, at the end of each road. The gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, nearly seven hundred miners who were now at work inside this giant anthill, all burrowing into the earth and riddling it with holes, like an old piece of wood being eaten away by woodworm. And in the heavy silence created by the crushing mass of earth it was possible to put an ear to the rock and hear the teeming activity of human insects on the march, from the whirr of the cables rising and falling as
the cages took the coal to the surface to the grinding of tools as they bit into the seam deep within each working.

As he turned, Étienne once more found himself pressed up close against Catherine. But this time he could discern the nascent curves of her breasts, and at once he understood the nature of the warmth he had felt:

‘So you're a girl, then?' he murmured in amazement.

Unabashed, she replied with her usual cheerfulness:

‘Of course I am…Dear me! That took you some time!'

The four hewers had just taken up position, stretched out at different levels one above the other and covering the entire height of the coal-face. Wooden planks, secured by hooks, stopped the coal from falling after they had cut it, and between these planks each man occupied a space of about four metres along the seam. This particular seam was so thin,
¹
barely fifty centimetres at this point, that they found themselves virtually crushed between roof and wall; they had to drag themselves forward on their elbows and knees and were quite unable to turn round without banging their shoulders. In order to get at the coal they had to lie on one side, twist their necks, and use both arms in order to raise their
rivelaine
, a short-handled pick, which they wielded at an angle.

Zacharie was at the bottom; then came Levaque and Chaval above him, and finally Maheu at the very top. Each man hacked into the shale bedrock, digging it out with his pick. Then he would make two vertical cuts in the coal, insert an iron wedge into the space above, and prise out a lump. The coal was soft, and the lump would break into pieces which then rolled down over his stomach and legs. Once these pieces had piled up against the boards put there to retain them, the hewers disappeared from view, immured in their narrow cleft.

Maheu had the worst of it. Up at the top the temperature reached thirty-five degrees; there was no circulation of air, and
the suffocating atmosphere was potentially fatal. In order to see what he was doing he had to hang his lamp from a nail, just by his head; and the continued heat of the lamp on his skull eventually raised his body temperature to fever level. But it was the wetness that made life particularly difficult. The rock above him, just a few centimetres from his face, was streaming with water, and large drops of it would keep falling in regular, rapid succession, always landing with stubborn insistence on exactly the same spot. Try as he might to twist his neck or bend his head back, they splattered remorselessly against his face and burst. After a quarter of an hour he would be soaked through, and with his body also bathed in sweat he steamed like a wash-tub. That particular morning a drop of water was continually hitting him in the eye, and it made him curse. He didn't want to stop hewing, and as he continued to hack fiercely at the rock, his body shook violently in the narrow space, like a greenfly caught between the leaves of a book and about to be squashed completely flat.

Not a word was exchanged. Everyone was tapping away, and all that could be heard was the irregular clunk-clunk of the picks, which seemed to come from far away. There were no echoes in this airless place, and sounds were more like a dull rasping. The darkness itself seemed to consist of an unfamiliar blackness that was thick with flying coal-dust and filled with gases that made the eyelids heavy. The wicks in the lamps were no more than reddish pinpricks of light beneath their gauze mantles. One could see almost nothing, and the coal-face simply rose into a pitch-black void, like a broad, flat, sloping chimney piled high with the soot of a dozen winters. Ghostly shapes moved about in it, and chance gleams of light picked out the curve of a hip, or a sinewy arm, or a wild-looking face blackened as though in readiness for a crime. From time to time, lumps of coal would gleam in the darkness as they came away, suddenly illuminated – a flat surface here, a sharp edge there – by the glint of light on crystal. Then it would all be dark again, and apart from the loud thudding of the picks all that could be heard were gasping lungs and the occasional groan of discomfort and fatigue caused by the thick air and the water raining down from the underground springs.