It was anything but pleasant work, this groping about old workings. It was also very dangerous. Many were the close shaves we had of being buried, sometimes alive, at others flattened out.
The soil, for the first twenty or thirty feet, was of a loose, friable description. Thence to the bottom, averaging eighty feet, was ‘standing ground,’ i.e., needed no timbering. But, in many cases, the slabbing from the upper parts had rotted away and fallen down, followed by big masses of earth, which blocked up the entrance to the drives where our work lay.
Then after, with great trouble, clearing the bottom, generally yellow pipeclay, and exploring the dark, cramped passages for pillars, we had, before beginning [77] ]to displace these, to support the roof by artificial ones. Timber had at the time of the rush been plentiful; as a consequence pillars were scarce. Also, the field, having in its prime been a wonderfully rich one, it had been repeatedly fossicked over. This made them scarcer still.
Often after a heavy job of clearing out and heaving-up mullock, water, and slabs, all the time in imminent peril of a ‘fall’ from some part of the shaft, would we discover, on exploring the drives, that they were simply groves of props—not a natural support left standing.
Such a network of holes and burrows as the place was! I can compare it to nothing but a Brobdingnagian
rabbit-warren.
The flat had been undermined, claim breaking into claim, until the wonder was that the whole top crust didn’t cave in. In some places this had happened, and one looked down into a dismal chaos of soil, rotten timber, and surface water.
As I have remarked, it was risky work this hunting for the few solitary grains amongst the rotten treasure-husks left by others, especially without a local knowledge of the past, which would have been so invaluable to us. But there came to be, nevertheless, a sort of dreary fascination in it.
We had heard that, on this same field, years after its total abandonment, a two hundred ounce nugget had been found by a solitary fossicker in a pillar left in an old claim.
Very often, I believe, did the picture of that big lump [78] ]rise before us as we crawled and twisted and wriggled about like a pair of great subterranean yellow eels, not knowing the moment a few odd tons of earth might fall and bury us.