Over the Bay—A Gigantic Dumb Waiter—Erebus—Reflections—White and Black Squares of the Chess-board—Leave-taking—An Interruption—The Aibstract Preencipels of Feenance.
Bright and early next morning we arose for an expedition across the bay to North Sydney and the coal-mines. A fresh breakfast in a sunny room, a brisk walk to the breezy, grass-grown parapet, that defends the harbor; a thought of the first expedition to lay down the telegraph line between the old and new hemispheres, for here lie the coils of the sub-marine cable, as they were left after the stormy essay of the steamer "James Adger," a year before—what a theme for a poet!
"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some spark, now dormant, of electric fire:
News, that the board of brokers might have swayed,
Or broke the banks that trembled with the wire."
—and we take an airy seat on the poop-deck of the little English steamer, and are wafted across the[Pg 186] harbor, five miles, to a small sea-port, where coal-schutes and railways run out over the wharfs, and coasters, both fore-and-aft, and square-rigged, are gathered in profusion. A glass of English ale at a right salt-sea tavern, a bay horse, and two-wheeled "jumper" for the road, and away we roll towards the mines. Now up hill and down; now passing another Micmac camp on the green margin of the beach; now by trim gardens without flowers; now getting nearer to the mines, which we know by the increasing blackness of the road; until at last we bowl past rows of one story dingy tenements of brick, with miners' wives and children clustered about them like funereal flowers; until we see the forges and jets of steam, and davits uplifted in the air; and hear the rattle of the iron trucks and the rush of the coal as it runs through the schutes into the rail-cars on the road beneath. We tie our pony beside a cinder-heap, and mount a ladder to the level of the huge platform above the shaft. A constant supply of small hand-cars come up with demoniac groans and shrieks from the bowels of the earth through the shaft. These are instantly seized by the laborers and run over an iron floor to the schute, where they are caught in titantic trammels, and overturned into harsh thunder. Meanwhile the demon car-bringer has sunk again on its errand; the[Pg 187] suspending rope wheeling down with dizzy swiftness. As one car-bearer descends, another rises to the surface with its twin wheel-vessels of coal.
"Would you like to go down?"
"How far down?"
"Sixty fathoms."
Three hundred and sixty feet! Think of being suspended by a thread, from a height twice that of Trinity's spire, and whirled into such a depth by steam! We crawled into the little iron box, just large enough to allow us to sit up with our heads against the top, both ends of our parachute being open; the operator presses down a bar, and instantly the earth and sky disappear, and we are wrapt in utter darkness. Oh? how sickening is this sinking feeling! Down—down—down! What a gigantic dumb-waiter! Down, down, a hot gust of vapor—a stifling sensation—a concussion upon the iron floor at the foot of the shaft; a multitude of twinkling lamps, of fiends, of grimy faces, and no bodies—and we are in a coal-mine.
There was a black, bituminous seat for visitors, sculptured out of the coal, just beyond the shaft, and to this we were led by the carboniferous fiends. My heart beat violently. I do not know how it went with Picton, but we were both silent. Oh![Pg 188] for a glimpse of the blue sky and waving trees above us, and a long breath of fresh air!
As soon as the stifling sensation passed away, we breathed more freely, and the lungs became accustomed to the subterranean atmosphere. In the gloom, we could see the smutted features only, of miners moving about, and to heighten the Dantesque reality, new and strange sounds, from different parts of the enormous cavern, came pouring towards the common centre—the shaft of the coal-pit.
These were the laden cars on the tram-ways, drawn by invisible horses, from the distant works in the mine, rolling and reverberating through the infernal aisles of this devil's cathedral. One could scarcely help recalling the old grandfather of Maud's Lord-lover:
——"lately died,
Gone to a blacker pit, for whom
Grimy nakedness, dragging his trucks
And laying his trams, in a poisoned gloom
Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine
Master of half a servile shire,
And left his coal all turned into gold
To a grandson, first of his noble line."
Intermingled with these sounds were others, the jar and clash of gateways, the dripping and splash[Pg 189]ing of water, the rolling thunder of the ascending and descending iron parachutes in the shaft, the trampling of horses, the distant report of powder-blasts, and the shrill jargon of human speakers, near, yet only partially visible.
"Is it a clear day overhead?" said the black bust of one of the miners, with a lamp in its hat!
Just think of it! We had only been divorced from the a?rial blue of a June sky a minute before. Our very horse was so high above us that we could have distinguished him only by the aid of a telescope—that is, if the solid ribs of the globe were not between us and him.
As soon as we became accustomed to the place, we moved off after the foreman of the mine. We walked through the miry tram-ways under the low, black arches, now stepping aside to let an invisible horse and car, "grating harsh thunder," pass us in the murky darkness; now through a door-way, momently closed to keep the foul and clear airs separate, until we came to the great furnace of the mine that draws off all the noxious vapors from this nest of Beelzebub. Then we went to the stables where countless horses are stalled—horses that never see the light of day again, or if they do, are struck blind by the apparition; now in wider galleries,[Pg 190] and new explorations, where we behold the busy miners, twinkling like the distant lights of a city, and hear the thunder-burst, as the blast explodes in the murky chasms. At last, tired, oppressed, and sickened with the vast and horrible prison, for such it seems, we retrace our steps, and once mor............