DESCENDING IN DARKNESS.
In these we took our seats, our legs hanging down, while we held to the chains above. At a given signal, the steel ring slipped along the bar, and we went smoothly and steadily down. The sensation very closely resembled that of descending a well. The darkness of the pit, which the feeble light of our torches made still darker, and the flickering shadows lent a certain gloomy picturesqueness to our perpendicular journey.
I might describe the anxiety and apprehension which I felt lest the chains should break, or I should be thrown out of my narrow seat into the great blackness below; but, as I did not have any such feeling, and as I question seriously if men of nerve or experience have it either, I will not try to render myself the hero of an imaginary situation.
I had supposed we should go to the lowest depths of the mines, but we stopped when we had descended four or five hundred feet, and got out. I learned then that the mines were full of wooden bridges and staircases by which the different levels were reached, and that by these communication was kept up with distant quarters. Some of the other shafts, as I was informed, are much deeper, requiring to be on a level with the galleries where the excavations are working. I had been taken down that particular one in order that I might see the entire arrangement and construction of the mines.
DESCENDING THE SHAFT.
CHAPEL.