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How, like an immense mine-shaft through the dim oppressed strata of society, this Institution of the Priesthood ran; opening, from the lowest depths towards all heights and towards Heaven itself, a free road of egress and emergence towards virtuous nobleness, heroism and well-doing, for every born man. This we may call the living lungs and blood-circulation of those old Feudalisms.
Inside it was quite dark, but in a few seconds, when my eyes had got used to the conditions, I observed a hole in the centre of the floor about five feet square. Peering over the edge, I saw that the shaft was about twenty-five feet deep, and that there was a light at the bottom. It then dawned upon me what it really was. It was a mine-shaft.
At the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved. Justly she accused her heart of treason. Heart and head were severed. This, as she partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope of her nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to break away from the light.
There is a chapter in Dickens's Hard Times which tells how it was discovered that somebody had fallen down a disused mine-shaft, and how the rescue was valiantly effected by a few men who had to be awakened for that end from their drunken Sunday afternoon sleep.
Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.
Tom went back to his chair by the side of Harry's bunk. Outdoors some of the men were clearing a path to the mine-shaft. Not that it was worth while to try to do any work underground. The rock at the tunnel heading was too stubborn to be moved by anything less than dynamite. "I'd get some lumber together, and make a pair of skis," suggested Jim, the next day, "but what is the use?
The settlement had been destroyed, positively, by stampeded cattle in tens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over and upon it. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horrible shapelessnesses. The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously strong timbers had fallen across and blocked it. But everything else was pure destruction. Calhoun said evenly; "Clever! Very clever!
As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall, and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old mine-shaft.
A head of water was collected by forming a reservoir along the mountain side, from which it was conducted through water-tight cast-iron pipes erected perpendicularly in the mine-shaft. About forty-five fathoms down, the water descending through the pipe was forced by the weight of the column above it into the bottom of a perpendicular cylinder, in which it raised a water-tight piston.
That was when we were what the doctor called convalescent that is to say, it was about a fortnight after our terrible experience in the old mine-shaft, and undoubtedly fast approaching the time when we might return to duty. "Anything else, sir?" said Denham sharply. I said nothing, but I winced.
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