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Roads had to be cut to the mines, machinery to be erected, and the ground opened up, in course of which some of the old adits were hit upon. The native peons or labourers were not accustomed to work, and at first they usually contrived to desert when they were not watched, so that very little progress could be made until the arrival of the expected band of miners from England.
I passed a pit on the western flank; the winch had been removed, and my people found it impracticable: we descended to it by cut steps and followed a cornice, mainly artificial, for a short distance to where its mouth opened. This hole had been sunk 70 to 80 feet deep in the talcose stone; and it would have been far easier and better to have driven galleries and adits into the face of the rock.
We used to break into the old shafts and adits which they had made, and find old stags'-horn pickaxes, that crumbled to pieces when we brought them to grass; and they say, that if a man will listen, sir, of a still night, about those old shafts, he may hear the ghosts of them at working, knocking, and picking, as clear as if there was a man at work in the next level. It may be all an old fancy.
"I think with most of us courage is largely a matter of experience," said Weston. "We learn to know what can't hurt us and to avoid the things that can. As to the other kind, the man who hazards his life and limbs in half-propped wild-cat adits, or running logs down the rapids, is hardly likely to be less cool in a tight place than the one who has never been accustomed to anything of the kind."
I have only met with one account of an experiment made in a horizontal direction, and it is curious that the law of the increase of temperature then observed seemed to be very much the same as that determined by the mean of the vertical observations. Boussingault found several horizontal adits in a precipitous face of porphyritic syenite among the mountains of Marmato.
There are shafts, adits, and levels just as in the mines of Colorado and California. The Russians give the name of priesk to a mine where gold is washed from the earth. The silver mine with its shafts in the solid rock is called a roodnik. As before stated, the word zavod is applied to foundries, smelting works, and manufactories in general.
He had the advantage of his enemies in this, that they were all thoroughly well acquainted with the ramifications of the old mine, and it would be in his power, he felt, to lead the enemy on by giving way strategically and guiding them where, while they were meeting with great difficulties in tracing their flying foes, these latter would be able to escape through one of the old adits and carry with them the King and his followers.
He looked at Saunders, who smiled in a rather grim fashion. "Adits cost money to drive," observed the latter. "You have brought some along?" Weston said that this was not the case, and Saunders spread out his hands. "Well," he said, "I'm broke.
It was from them that he had received the greatest kindnesses he could remember. They were cheerful optimists; indomitable grapplers with forest and flood, who did almost incredible things with ax and saw and giant-powder. They lived in lonely ranch houses, tents and rudely flung-up shacks; driving the new roads along the rangeside or risking life and limb in wild-cat adits.
As a rule, they know more about shafts and adits than scientific geology." "Would you expect to find the ore where I have told you?" "Well," he said thoughtfully, "the Laurentian rocks are very old, and our miners have so far dealt with newer formations. On the whole, I think it possible that ore like this has been forced up from unusual depths." "But would the silver be easily refined?"
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