“Then I’ll go down without you while you’re doing it,” young Carrington declared, willfully.
Trevanion followed him into the cage without more ado. But he didn’t like it.
As the cage dropped into the blackness of the shaft, Richards thought with malicious pleasure that he would outwit them all. Trevanion, holding it everyday work for himself, was uneasy over the boy; Hastings was impatient at his own ignorance—he hated to feel so out of his sphere; Mr. Wade, reviewing each successive stage of the proceedings which had placed him in his present situation, called himself what he would have slain any fellow man for thinking, a silly old fool; and Carrington—ah, a curious tangle of thoughts was young Carrington’s brain, with a curious after-vision of a bright blue sky.
Up in the big house on the hill, John Carrington was wondering if it was not time for Ned to come home.
* * * * *
It is a curious experience—this going underground for the first time.
The chill and the dampness, the change in the air pressure, and the darkness—that vague, depressing darkness, on which the candle in your cap makes so vague and flickering an impression that it seems nervous and palpitant at its own temerity in attempting so gigantic a task.
Above all, and above you, as you clearly realize, for an eighth of a mile, perhaps, the huge impending weight of earth and rock, against whose menace timbering a foot and a half thick seems like trying to bolster the basement of a tottering St. Paul’s with matches.
It is like finding oneself in some gigantic letter press, the screw of which the hand of fate may choose to turn—perhaps now; pressing downward with pitiless, relentless, inanimate mechanism until the Parchment of the World bears the dull red mark of these unwilling witnesses to its deed.
These are all terrors unconfessed. Farthest of real menaces you find—whose vague terror is made dormant by the real necessities of the moment, the constant strain of the eye to distinguish—now to avoid the direct peril of an uncovered winze underfoot, now to notice how closely the “lagging” roofs in the drift, this indefinitely long hole, seven and a half feet square, in which you find yourself.