It had stopped raining and the sky had cleared a little when they went to the door half an hour later. To the right, across the road, rose a tall gaunt shape like the skeleton of an elongated pyramid crowned with two big wheels. Lights were blazing round it, for the pit was working night and day getting the steam coal to the surface.
"Yonder's t' shaft," said Tom, as they shook hands. "It doesn't look much of a place to save the world in, does it?"
CHAPTER XXV
PREPARING FOR ACTION
The next day was a busy one, not only for Lennard himself but for others whose help he had come to enlist in the working out of the Great Experiment.
He turned up at Bowcock's house on the stroke of seven, got into his pit clothes, and was dropped down the twelve-hundred-foot shaft in the cage. At the bottom of the shaft he found a solid floor sloping slightly eastward, with three drives running in fan shape from north-east and south-east. There were two others running north and north-west.
After ten minutes' very leisurely walk round the base of the shaft, during which he made one or two observations by linear and perpendicular compass, he said to Tom Bowcock:
"I think this will do exactly. The points are absolutely correct. If we had dug a hole for ourselves we couldn't have got one better than this. Yes, I think it will just do. Now, will you be good enough to take me to the surface as slowly as you can?"