At long intervals there came a heavy silence. The holes had been bored to the requisite depth. The machine was drawn far back into the boring. Explosives were slipped into the holes and tamped home. From a safe distance the charges were fired. A dull, smothered roar, a rending and crumbling, and another gap was torn in the bowels of this monarch of the Alps. The excavators hurried forward, cleared away the tumbled debris, and brought the lumbering drill carriage up to the fresh working surface.
Day in and day out, week after week, month by month, this round continued. It was monotonous, and the work was hard. The stifling atmosphere and the conditions told severely on the physique of the workmen. Congestion of the brain, irregular action of the heart, anæmia, or one of numerous other obscure maladies, was the reward for their labour. Their faces assumed a deathly pallor; working in cramped positions gave them an unsightly stoop, and deprived their legs of movement, so they tottered rather than walked as they returned from the scene of their toil at the end of the shift.
The pay was wretched, ranging from half-a-crown to five shillings (from 60 to 125 cents) per day of eight hours, out of which they had to board themselves! Needless to say, but few Englishmen or western Europeans figured on the pay-roll, for none would accept such starvation pay for such terrible work. The labourers were Italians for the most part, and yet nearly one and all, by subsisting on miserable food, consisting for the most part of a kind of meal porridge, cheap and yet limited in quantity, saved a part of their earnings and sent it home to their needy families in sunny Italy. The average number of men employed was about 4000, half at either end, but at times it ran up to as high as 7000. The mountain claimed 310 lives, killed by accident alone, and 877 injured, before it was conquered; but, considering the conditions, it is remarkable that the casualty roll was not heavier.
In the wake of the small heading gallery came the other gangs. These rigged up the timber and other supports to the roof and excavated the small opening to the full dimensions of the tunnel. Last of all came the masons, setting the masonry lining, from 18 to 30 inches thick, in position, for the tunnel is lined throughout. In passing through the granite rock there was but little fear of a collapse of the roof, but in the treacherous clay advance had to be made warily, and heavy timbering resorted to, in order to prevent the soft soil caving in and burying all in its sticky embrace.
The material for the headings and lining, as well as the workmen and tools, were carried to and fro upon a small railway, the locomotives of which were driven by compressed air—steam was impracticable, because it would have fouled the workings; while on the short distance between the inner end of the railway and the working face haulage was done by horses. The privations suffered by the navvies was only equalled by those experienced by the animals, the mortality of which ran up to as high as twenty-five per cent. of the number employed.
Water was a constant menace, and at times retarded progress seriously. On the south side it was particularly troublesome. Time after time the drills or detonating charges would tap one of these subterranean streams, and the water would pour out in a cascade. These rivulets were of varying volume, but in one stretch, where the rock was extremely friable, it was considered too dangerous to use the mechanical drilling machine, so the men had to cut their way forward by hand. In so doing they released a vast underground pocket of water, which rushed out at the rate of over 3000 gallons per minute. At one spot it was only by superhuman effort that headway was made, for the men were half submerged in these torrential outbursts, escape from which was only possible by penetrating farther into the mountain.
In 1876 another terrible calamity overtook Louis Favre. It was discovered suddenly that the railway, far from costing the estimated sum, would approximate over £11,500,000, or $57,500,000. Somebody had blundered, and badly too. A deficit of over £4,000,000, or $20,000,000, appeared certain. What was to be done? The development of such a contingency never could have happened at a more inopportune moment. Times were hard; money was scarce; financial crashes loomed in every quarter of the Continent; and, to make matters worse, war was raging. Never in the history of engineering had such an extraordinary and unaccountable mistake been made in the estimates.
The discovery came as a thunderclap. The stock of the company ran down like a thermometer plunged into ice. Those who had supported the enterprise in the face of hostile criticism began to doubt the wisdom of their optimism. A gloom settled everywhere. It appeared as if the gigantic achievement would become numbered among the great unpaid; would be another contribution to those unfinished enterprises characterised as follies.
But Monsieur Favre kept going. There was the daily penalty staring him in the face if he did not finish within time. Any prolonged delay spelled ruin to him and to those who had financed his task. To make matters worse, the Swiss departments who had the most to gain from the completion of the railway steadfastly refused to extend the slightest assistance.
Matters reached a crisis. Either the money must be found, or that already spent must lie buried in the mountain. An International Conference was called to consider the situation, where, as prominent cities and railways who hoped to reap something from the completion of the tunnel promised support, Germany, Switzerland and Italy agreed to increase their subventions. Much of the projected work originally contemplated was postponed indefinitely in order to reduce the first cost.