These old, decaying places breed all manner of gases, some of them, as the firedamp (carburetted hydrogen gas), dangerous to human life.
One winter night, in 1874, some of the residents of the western part of Virginia City were startled by seeing what seemed a column of flame fifty or sixty feet in height, shooting up from the mouth of an old shaft near the old upper works of the Ophir Company. It was at first thought that the timbers in the old mine were on fire, and three or four men ran to the spot to see what could be done toward smothering the flames.
On reaching the shaft, however, they found that there was no smell of smoke, and also that the supposed fire was a light unlike anything they had ever before seen, in its weird whiteness and the strange coruscations of its component particles,[particles,] the light shed about by the flame, the faces of the men were of a corpse-like pallor[pallor]. Their clothing and hair also partook in some degree of the same ghastly and unnatural hue. The light came up the full size of the large square shaft, and seen at a distance, as it rose through the falling snow, closely resembled one of the shooting spires of the aurora borealis, and it exhibited something of the same waving and inconstant motion.
Although the men felt creeping over them a sort of superstitious awe, they still had sufficient courage to approach the shaft and gaze into it. A strange sight was there seen. The whole interior of the shaft seemed to be at a white heat, and glowed like a furnace. The timbers on the sides were particularly brilliant. Each splinter, excrescence, or bit of fungus seemed darting dazzling rays that streamed steadily out in all directions. A warm, strange current of air ascended from the sweltering regions below, and there was observed a musty, sickening smell. All of those who looked into the shaft afterwards felt a severe pain in the temples, and two or three were made sick at the stomach.
This strange appearance lasted over half an hour, and before it ended a crowd of a dozen or more miners returning from their work had collected about the shaft. The light died out from the top downwards, and protuberances from the sides of the shaft continued to glow for some minutes after the light was no longer visible at its top. This remarkable phenomenon was undoubtedly caused by the belching forth of a highly phosphurated gas of some kind from the deep, underground chambers of the old abandoned works. The rush of this gas was probably caused by an extensive cave in a place where the timbers had rotted away. One of the men who witnessed the spectacle was of the opinion that the mingling of the gas from the mine with the atmospheric air had something to do with intensifying the light. He observed in the ascending current of pseudo-flame myriads of small particles of some substance of a floss-like texture, which appeared to flash and glow as they darted upward, and which presented in the general column of light much the same appearance as motes moving about in a sunbeam.
In February, 1874, some miners at work in the Utah mine, just north of Virginia City, were all made temporarily blind by certain water or gases which they encountered. They were running a drift at the depth of 400 feet to connect with some old, flooded works. When the end of the drift neared the old works, the water they contained began to be drained off. The water had attained a great height, and the pressure was so strong that it sent streams darting and hissing from every hole and crevice in the rock in which the drift was being run. In places, these streams of water spurted out with as much force as though they had been thrown by a hydraulic pipe.
The water, or the steam and gases from it, poisoned all who worked in the drift. Their heads and faces were so swollen that their eyes were closed, and all were thus rendered blind for some days. A few years before, the same thing occurred in the Savage and the Yellow-Jacket mines, when drifts were run to tap old flooded works in which rotten timbers were soaking. Quite recently, all the miners at work in the Sutro Tunnel were poisoned, and had their eyes closed for some days by the tapping of a shaft which had been filled with water for two or three years. All who are thus poisoned speedily recover by remaining above ground for three or four days.
CHAPTER XXIV.
FIREDAMP.—A MINE IN FLAMES.
No premature explosion of blasts, crushing in of timbers, caving of earth and rock—no accident of any kind is so much feared or is more terrible than a great fire in a large mine. It is a hell, and often a hell that contains living, moving, breathing, and suffering human beings—not the ethereal and intangible souls of men. It is a region of fire and flame, from which the modes of egress are few and perilous. A great fire on the surface of the earth is a grand and fearful spectacle, but a great fire hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the earth is terrible—terrible beyond measure or the power of words to express, when we know that far down underneath the ground which lies so calmly on all sides, giving forth no sound, are scores of human beings pursued by flames and gases, scorched and panting, fleeing into all manner of nooks and corners, there to meet their death.