But winzes! What winzes are is still a secret of the ten-hundred-and-eighty-foot level of the Treadwell mine.
Tram-cars filled with ore, each drawn by a single horse, passed us in every drift—or was it in crosscuts and levels? One horse had been in the mine seven years without once seeing sunlight or fields of green grass; without once sipping cool water from a mountain creek with quivering, sensitive lips; without once stretching his aching limbs upon the soft sod of a meadow, or racing with his fellows upon a hard road.
But every man passing one of these horses gave him an affectionate pat, which was returned by a low, pathetic whinny of recognition and pleasure.
"One old fellow is a regular fool about these horses," said the manager, observing our interest. "He's always carrying them down armfuls of green grass, apples, sugar, and everything a horse will eat. You'd ought to hear them nicker at sight of him. If they pass him in a drift, when he hasn't got a thing for them, they'll nicker and nicker, and keep turning their heads to look after him. Sometimes it makes me feel queer in my throat."
No one can by any chance know what noise is until he has stood at the head of a drift and heard three Ingersoll-Sergeant drills beating with lightning-like rapidity into the walls of solid quartz for the purpose of blasting.
Standing between these drills and within three feet of them, one suddenly is possessed of the feeling that his sense of hearing has broken loose and is floating around in his head in waves. This feeling is followed by one of suffocation. Shock succeeds shock until one's very mind seems to go vibrating away.
At a sign from the manager the silence is so sudden and so intense that it hurts almost as much as the noise.
There is a fascination in walking through these high-ceiled, brilliantly lighted stopes, and these low-ceiled, shadowy drifts. Walls and ceilings are gray quartz, glittering with gold. One is constantly compelled to turn aside for cars of ore on their way to the dumping-places, where their burdens go thundering to the levels below.
At last the manager paused.
"I suppose," said he, sighing, "you wouldn't care to see the—"