No, Mr. Sheridan, you could not; at least not in these latter days. Too many people do it now for the impostor to remain undiscovered. Take my own case, for instance. I had often read descriptions of mine descents, and thought I knew how it happened, and how ore was got out. But no one ever told me that you had to go paddling about in water half the time, or that mines were excavated upwards. Now, then, if I had tried to pretend that I had been down a mine I should have been promptly found out, by my ignorance of the two first facts that strike one. Again, it is very simple work imagining the descent of a "shaft" in a "cage." But unfortunately a cage is only a platform to stand on without either sides or top, and not, therefore, such a cage as one would buy to keep a bird in, or as would keep a bird in if one did buy it. Nor, without actually experiencing it, could anybody guess that the first sensation of whizzing down a pipe, say 800 feet, is that of seeming to lose all your specific gravity, and that the next (after you had partially collected your faculties) is that you are stationary yourself, but that the dripping timbers that line the shaft are all flying upwards past you like sparks up a chimney.
Mines, of course, differ from one another just as the men who go down them do, but as far as I myself am concerned all mines are puddly places, and the sensations of descent are ridiculous—for I have only been down two in my life, and both "demned, damp, moist, unpleasant" places. But the mine to which I now refer is the "Ontario," in Utah, which may be said, in the preposterous vernacular of the West, to be a "terrible fine" mine, or, in other words, "a boss mine," that is to say, "a daisy."
As for daisies, anything that greatly takes the fancy or evokes especial admiration is called a daisy. Thus I heard a very much respected Mormon Bishop, who is also a director of a railway, described by an enthusiastic admirer as "a daisy!"
Finding myself in Park "City" one evening—it is a mining camp dependent chiefly upon the Ontario—I took a walk up the street with a friend. Every other house appeared to be a saloon, with a doctor's residence sandwiched in between—a significantly convenient arrangement perhaps in the days when there was no "Protective Committee" in Park City, but—so I am told—without much practical benefit to the public in these quiet days, when law-abiding citizens do their own hanging, without troubling the county sheriff, who lives somewhere on the other side of a distance. The result of this is that bad characters do not stay long enough in Park City now to get up free fights, and make work for the doctors. The Protective Committee invites them to "git" as soon as they arrive, and, to do them credit, they do "git."
However, as I was saying, I took a walk with a friend along the street, and presently became aware above me, high up on the hillside, of a great collection of buildings, with countless windows (I mean that I did not try to count them) lit up, and looking exactly like some theatrical night-scene. These were the mills of the Ontario, which work night and day, and seven days to the week, a perpetual flame like that of the Zoroastrians, and as carefully kept alive by stalwart stokers as ever was Vestal altar-fire by the girl-priestesses of Rome. It was a picturesque sight, with the huge hills looming up black behind, and the few surviving pine-trees showing out dimly against the darkening sky.
Next morning I went up to the mine—and down it.
Having costumed myself in garments that made getting dirty a perfect luxury, I was taken to the shaft. Now, I had expected to see an unfathomably black hole in the ground with a rope dangling down it, but instead of that I found myself in a spacious boarded shed, with a huge wheel standing at one end and a couple of iron uprights with a cross-bar standing up from the floor at the other. Round the wheel was coiled an enormous length of a six-inch steel-wire band, and the disengaged end of the band, after passing over a beam, was fastened to the cross-bar above mentioned. On the bridge of the wheel stood an engineer, the arbiter of fates, who is perpetually unwinding victims down from stage to stage of the Inferno, and winding up the redeemed from limbo to limbo. Having propitiated him by an affectation of intelligence as to the machinery which he controlled, we took our places under the cross-bar, between the stanchions, and suddenly the floor—as innocent-looking and upright-minded a bit of boarded floor as you could wish to stand on—gave way beneath us, and down we shot apud inferos, like the devils in "Der Freischütz." We had our lamps in our hands, and they gave just light enough for me to see the dripping wooden walls of the shaft flashing past, and then I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter—a mere butterfly—imponderable. But it doesn't take many seconds to fall down 800 feet, and long before I had expected it I found we were "at the bottom."
Our explorations then began; and very queer it all was, with the perpetual gushing of springs from the rock, and the bubble and splash of the waters as they ran along on either side the narrow tunnels; the meetings at corners with little cars being pushed along by men who looked, as they bent low to their work, like those load-rolling beetles that Egypt abounds in; the machinery for pumping, so massive that it seemed much more likely that it was found where it stood, the vestiges of a long-past subterranean civilization, than that it had been brought down there by the men of these degenerate days; the sudden endings of the tunnels which the miners were driving along the vein, with a man at each ending, his back bent to fit into the curve which he had made in the rock, and reminding one of the frogs that science tells us are found at times fitted into holes in the middle of stones; the climbing up hen-roost ladders from tunnel to tunnel, from one darkness into another; the waiting at different spots till "that charge had been blasted," and the dull, deadened roar of the explosion had died away; the watching the solitary miners at their work picking and thumping at the discoloured strips of dark rock that looked to the uninitiated only like water-stained, mildewy accidents in the general structure, but which, in reality, was silver, and yielding, it might be, $1600 to the ton!
"This is all very rich ore," said my guide, kicking a heap that I was standing on. I got off it at once, reverentially.
But reverence for the Mother of the Dollar gradually dies out, for everything about you, above you, beneath you, is silver or silverish—dreadful rubbish to look at, it is true, but with the spirit of the great metal in it all none the less; that fairy Argentine who builds palaces for men, and gives them, if they choose, all the pleasures of the world, and the leisure wherein to enjoy them. And there they stood, these latter-day Cyclops, working away like the gnomes of the Hartz Mountains, or the entombed artificers of the Bear-Kings of Dardistan, with their lanterns glowing at the end of their tunnels like the Kanthi gem which Shesh, the fabled snake-god, has provided for his gloomy empire of mines under the Nagas' hills. Useless crystals glittered on every side, as if they were jewels, and the water dripping down the sides glistened as if it was silver, but the pretty hypocrisy was of no avail. For though the ore itself was dingy and ugly and uninviting, the ruthless pick pursued it deeper and deeper into its retreat, and only struck the harder the darker and uglier it got. It reminded me, watching the miner at his work, of the fairy story where the prince in disguise has to kill the lady of his love in order to release her from the enchantments which have transformed her, and how the wicked witch makes her take shape after shape to escape the resolute blows of the desperate lover. But at last his work is accomplished, and the ugly thing stands before him in all the radiant beauty of her true nature.