“Why, we set to work like men, I can tell you:—Seth, there, will bear me out.”
“We did so, sirree,” said that worthy, with a most emphatic nod.
“Yes,” continued Mr Rawlings, “we first renovated the dam, and dug out a channel for the overplus of water on either side of the shaft; and then we started pumping out the mine.”
“An’ it were a job!” said Seth, taking up the thread of the story. “I’ve been in a vessel as sprung a leak, and where the hands were pumping day and night, with nary a spell off, so as to kip a plank atween us and the bottom of Davy Jones’s looker; but, never, in all my born days, have I seed sich pumpin’ as went on in that thaar week!”
“As Seth says,” resumed Mr Rawlings, “we were like mariners pumping at the hold of a water-logged ship, as if for life. We pumped, and pumped, and pumped; but, in spite of all our efforts, only succeeded in just keeping the enemy in check, that’s all.”
“Can’t get the mine dry, eh?”
“No, not for any length of time. What we gain in the day, we lose again at night. In concise terms, I may put it, that by keeping the hose constantly at work, which of course interrupts the progress of excavation, we barely manage to hold our own, neither gaining nor losing an inch.”
“That’s a bad lookout!” said Ernest Wilton, shaking his head.
It was. It meant ruin to all their hopes and expectations; the inglorious end of the expedition; the sacrifice of all their toil and perseverance throughout those terribly arduous winter months; their waste of energy in struggling with the powers of nature. It meant all that, and more!
Such a state of things would never do to last.