THE SERRANO MINE.
“The mine is situated in the hill below the Buffa, at the upper end of the city. Five hundred men, women, and children are employed at this mine, getting out the ore, breaking it up, and sorting it. The men generally work in small gangs, for a share of the sales of the ore they take out. The amount of silver mined, weekly, is about five thousand dollars, and the expenses one thousand dollars, leaving a net profit of four thousand dollars. The great tiro is about nine hundred and fifty feet in depth.
A horizontal tunnel penetrates the hill from a level with the hacienda, cutting the tiro, or perpendicular shaft, at four hundred feet from the surface. This tunnel may be about fifteen hundred feet in length; a railroad track runs through it, and lying down in the cars, we were carried in to the edge of the tiro.
This tiro is thirty feet in diameter, and six sided, laid up in cement, like that at the Valenciano.
The necessity for this is seen in the fact that a rock, weighing many tons, was displaced from a station near the bottom of the shaft, a few days previous to our visit, and falling upon the miners beneath, killed and maimed a large number of them.
Standing here, four hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and six hundred feet above the bottom of the shaft, with a patch of pale blue sky far above us, and inky darkness, almost palpable to the touch, around us, and filling all the depths below, we witnessed the most wonderful scene on which we gazed in Mexico.
Men were sent up to the top of the tiro at the surface of the ground, and told to discharge rockets down it. This they did, and the hissing and explosions of the fiery messengers caused the most deafening echoes and re-echoes, while the sides of the shaft, dripping with ooze and slime, were revealed with startling distinctness by the momentary glare.
But this was nothing to what followed; balls of the fiber of the maguey, or aloe plant, three feet in diameter, and steeped in pine pitch or resin, were swung out over the mouth of the shaft, and set on fire. When the first was in full blaze, it was detached, and allowed to fall into the abyss. Like a great comet with body of molten metal, and long tail of flame, rushing on a doomed planet, the monster projectile came down from the dizzy height above us, and passing the mouth of the tunnel in which we stood, with a roar more deafening than the loudest thunder, went bounding and crashing into the depths below, illuminating everything, for a moment, with the blinding, lurid glare, followed by a darkness and silence more profound than before. As soon as the tremendous echoes which were awakened by the first, had died away, a second was sent down, and others followed in quick succession.
Most of our party were unable to control their nerves sufficiently to enable them to approach the edge and look up and down the tiro, holding by ropes to prevent them from becoming dizzy and falling headlong into the depths, but those who could do so, beheld a scene, the awful sublimity and grandeur of which beggars all the powers of language.
DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE MINE.