We were evidently very close to the infernal regions. Here, indeed, would have been a splendid setting for an orthodox hell. Peons whose only garment was the size of a postcard, some even with their hats off, glistened all over their brown bodies as under a shower-bath. In five minutes I had sweated completely through my garments, in ten I could wring water out of my jacket; drops fell regularly at about half-second intervals from the end of my nose and chin. The dripping sweat formed puddles beneath the toilers, the air was so scarce and second-hand every breath was a deep gasp; nowhere a sign of exit, as if we had been walled up in this narrow, low-ceiled, jagged-rock passageway for all time.
My work here was to take samples from the "roof." A grinning peon who called himself "Bruno Básques" (Vásquez) followed me about, holding his hat under the hammer with which I chipped bits of rock from above, back and forth across the top of the tunnel, every few feet. The ore ran very high in grade here, the vein being some six feet of whitish rocky substance between sheer walls of ordinary rock. It struck one most forcibly, this strange inquisitiveness of man that had caused him to prowl around inside the earth like a mole, looking for a peculiar kind of soil or stone which no one at first sight could have guessed was of any particular value. The peons, smeared all over with the drippings of candle-grease, worked steadily for all the heat and stuffiness. Indeed, one could not but wonder at the amount of energy they sold for a day's wages; though of course their industry was partly due to my "gringo" presence. We addressed them as inferiors, in the "tu" form and with the generic title "hombre," or, more exactly, in the case of most of the American bosses, "húm-bray." The white man who said "please" to them, or even showed thanks in any way, such as giving them a cigarette, lost caste in their eyes as surely as with a butler one might attempt to treat as a man. I tried it on Bruno, and he almost instantly changed from obsequiousness to near-insolence. When I had put him in his place again, he said he was glad I spoke Spanish, for so many "jefes" had pulled his hair and ears and slapped him in the face because he did not understand their "strange talk." He did not mention this in any spirit of complaint, but merely as a curious fact and one of the many visitations fate sees fit to send those of her children unluckily born peons. His jet black hair was so thick that small stones not only did not hurt his head as they fell from under my hammer, but remained buried in his thatch, so that nearly as many samples were taken from this as from the roof of the passage.
Thus the sweat-dripping days passed, without a hint of what might be going on in the world far above, amid the roar and pounding of air and hand-drills, the noisy falling of masses of rock as these broke it loose, the constant ringing of shovels, the rumble of iron ore-cars on their thread-like rails, cries of "'stá pegado!" quickly followed by the stunning, ear-splitting dynamite blast, screams of "No vás echar!" as some one passed beneath an opening above, of "Ahora sí!" when he was out of danger; the shrill warning whistling of the peons echoing back and forth through the galleries and labyrinthian side tunnels, as the crunch of shoes along the track announced the approach of some boss; the shouting of the peons "throwing" a loaded car along the track through the heavy smoke-laden air, so thick with the smell of powder and thin with oxygen that even experienced bosses developed raging headaches, and the Beau Brummel secretary of the company fell down once with dizziness and went to bed after the weekly inspection.
When the first day was done I carried the ten sacks of samples—via Bruno's shoulders—through the labyrinth of corridors and shafts to be loaded on a car and pushed to the main shaft, where blew a veritable sea-breeze that gave those coming from the red-hot pockets a splendid chance for catching cold which few overlooked. In the bodega, or underground office, I changed my dripping garments for dry ones, but waited long for the broken-down motor to lift me again finally to pure air. In the days that followed I was advanced to the rank of car-boss in this same level, and found enough to do and more in keeping the tricky car-men moving. A favorite ruse was to tip over a car on its way to the chute and to grunt and groan over it for a half-hour pretending to lift it back on the rails; or to tuck away far back in some abandoned "lead" the cars we needed, until I went on tours of investigation and ferreted them out.
During the last days of October I drew my car-boss wages and set out to follow the ore after it left the mine. From the underground chutes it was drawn up to the surface in the iron buckets, dumped on "gridleys" (screens made of railroad rails separated a like width) after weighing, broken up and the worthless rock thrown out on the "dump," a great artificial hill overhanging the valley below and threatening to bury the little native houses huddled down in it. A toy Baldwin locomotive dragged the ore trains around the hill to the noisy stamp-mill spreading through another valley, with a village of adobe huts overgrown with masses of purple flowers and at the bottom a plain of white sand waste from which the "values" had been extracted. The last samples I had taken assayed nine pounds of silver and 23 grams of gold to the ton. The carloads were dumped into bins at the top of the mill.
The nature of the country had been taken advantage of in the building, which hung twelve stories high on the steep hillside, making gravitation the chief means of transportation during the refining process. Rocks were screened into one receptacle and broken up by hand. The finer stuff went direct to the stamps. Stones of ordinary size were spread by machinery on a broad leather belt that passed three peon women, who picked out and tossed away the oreless stones. Their movements were leisurely, but they were sharp-eyed and very few worthless bits got by the three of them. A story below, the picked material went under deafening stamps weighing tons and striking several blows a second, while water was turned in to soften the material. This finally ran down another story in liquid form into huge cylinders where it was rolled and rolled again and at last flowed on, smelling like mortar or wet lime, onto platforms of zinc constantly shaking as with the ague and with water steadily flowing over them. Workmen about the last and most concentrated of these were locked in rooms made of chicken-wire. Below, the stuff flowed into enormous vats, like giants' washtubs, and was stirred and watered here for several days until the "values" had settled and were drawn off at the bottom. There were three stories, or some thirty, of these immense vats. The completed process left these full of white sand which a pair of peons spent several days shoveling out and carrying down into the valley.
The "values" were next run down into smaller vats and treated with zinc shavings, precipitating a 50 per cent. pure metal, black in color, which was put into melting-pots in a padlocked room overseen by an American. Here it was cast in large brick molds, these being knocked off and the metal left to slack, after which it was melted again and finally turned into gray-black blocks of the size and form of a paving-brick, 85 per cent. pure, about as heavy as the average lady would care to lift, and worth something like $1250 each. Two or four of these were tied on the back of a donkey and a train of them driven under guard to the town office, whence they were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles for the vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by revolutionists. On this same ground the old colonial Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled patio, treat it with mercury, and drive mules round and round in it for weeks until they pocketed whatever was left to them after paying the king's fifth and the tithes of the church.
My rucksack on the back of a peon—and it is astonishing how much more easily one's possessions carry in that fashion; as if it were indeed that automatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated inventing—I set off to the neighboring mine of "Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed to carry anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain at this half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. Being drawn out, he grew quite cheery on this new fashion of carrying—"when the load is not much." In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone sweeping across the high country, the trail lay across tumbled stretches of rocky ground, range behind range of mountains beyond and a ruined stone hut or corral here and there carrying the memory back to Palestine. For a half hour we had Guanajuato in full sight in its narrow gully far below. Many donkeys pattered by under their loads of encinal fagots, the ragged, expressionless drivers plodding silently at their heels.
Ahead grew the roar of "Peregrina's" stamp-mill, and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe político, a handsome Mexican, built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the stealing of ore by workmen is particularly prevalent, and even the searching by the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even the skimming off of the scum leaves the floor scattered with chips of silver with a high percentage of gold which even the American in charge cannot always keep the men from concealing. Hence there occurs periodically the scene we were about to witness.
When the native workmen of the "zinc room" enter for the day, they are obliged to strip in one chamber and pass on to the next to put on their working clothes, reversing the process when they leave. To-day all five of them were herded together in one dressing-room, of which, the three of us being admitted, the door was locked. The jefe político, as the government authority of the region, set about searching them, and as his position depended on the good-will of the powerful mining company, it was no perfunctory "frisking." The ragged fellows were called up one by one and ordered to strip of blouses, shirts, and trousers, and even huarachas, their flat leather sandals, the jefe examining carefully even the seams of their garments. Indeed, he even searched the hairs of their bodies for filings of "high-grade."