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From the bottom of this gugg I went along a very undulating twin-way, into which, every thirty yards or so, opened one of those steep putt-ways which they called topples, the twin-ways having plates of about 2-1/2 ft. gauge for the putts from the headings, or workings, above to come down upon, full of coal and shale: and all about here, in twin-way and topples, were ends and corners, and not one had been left without its walling-in, and only one was then intact, some, I fancied, having been broken open by their own builders at the spur of suffocation, or hunger; and the one intact I broke into with a mattock it was only a thin cake of plaster, but air-tight and in a space not seven feet long behind it I found the very ill-smelling corpse of a carting-boy, with guss and tugger at his feet, and the pad which protected his head in pushing the putts, and a great heap of loaves, sardines, and bottled beer against the walls, and five or six mice that suddenly pitched screaming through the opening which I made, greatly startling me, there being of dead mice an extraordinary number in all this mine-region.
Tell me more about Sir Charles, and what you have all been going through at the station." "Can't. It would take a month." "Oh! do tell me something." "Breaking our hearts about you, then everybody in the place. Even poor old Mother Smithers sat down and cried like a child; didn't she, Pete?" "Gugg!" said the lad, out of the darkness. "Can you get at your knife, Mr Archie?
After a short climb we descended upon the Gugg, glacier, most lamentably unpoetical of names, and mounted by it to the great plateau which lies below the cliffs immediately under the col. We reached this at about seven, and, after a short meal, carefully examined the route above us. Half way between us and the col lay a small and apparently level plateau of snow.
Mine's turned into a screw-driver, and I want to help this nig Malay gentleman to cut sticks." "Here you are, Pete," said Archie, after a hard struggle to get his hand into the pocket of his overall, and a harder struggle still to get it back with the knife. "Thankye gugg sir! Blest if I don't believe I'm going to have a cold!" And the cutting and rustling of thick, leafy branches went on.
I went back to the standing, and at one point in the ground, where there was a windlass and chain, lowered myself down a 'cut' a small pit sunk perpendicularly to a lower coal-stratum, and here, almost thinking I could hear the perpetual rat-tat of notice once exchanged between the putt-boys below and the windlass-boys above, I proceeded down a dipple to another place like a standing, for in this mine there were six, or perhaps seven, veins: and there immediately I came upon the acme of the horrible drama of this Tartarus, for all here was not merely crowded, but, at some points, a packed congestion of flesh, giving out a strong smell of the peach, curiously mixed with the stale coal-odour of the pit, for here ventilation must have been very limited; and a large number of these masses had been shot down by only three hands, as I found: for through three hermetical holes in a plaster-wall, built across a large gugg, projected a little the muzzles of three rifles, which must have glutted themselves with slaughter; and when, after a horror of disgust, having swum as it were through a dead sea, I got to the wall, I peeped from a small clear space before it through a hole, and made out a man, two youths in their teens, two women, three girls, and piles of cartridges and provisions; the hole had no doubt been broken from within at the spur of suffocation, when the poison must have entered; and I conjectured that here must be the mine-owner, director, manager, or something of that sort, with his family.
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