60 Spring 



nately till he is sixty or seventy feet beneath the sur- 

 face. To realise how much labour this involves it 

 must be remembered that the excavated chalk is 

 shovelled upward from stage to stage by hand. His 

 method of descent is by leaping down this flight of 

 gigantic steps. It is no wonder that few visitors care 

 to follow. People who think nothing of descending 

 a coal-mine shrink from it. You jump to the first 

 stage quite cheerily, for you see where you are going 

 to ; at the next the grey landing-place still glimmers 

 as in twilight, but after that the leaps must be taken 

 into a darkness gross as that of Erebus, in blind faith 

 that there must be a platform. When the bottom at 

 last is reached, a faint little flare of candle-light 

 shows the mouth of a tunnel some eighteen feet long. 

 Crawling up this on hands and knees, the jagged 

 white walls hardly visible, you come upon the pitman 

 lying on his side and with his pick trying to loosen 

 the chalk round a heavy nodule of flint Like many 

 solitary workers, he has a way of talking to himself, 

 and now coaxingly addresses the stone, ' Come away, 

 my beauty drop down now that's a good 'un.' 

 Anon he mutters in fury, ' I'll have you, you beast, if 

 the house falls.' But it is a heavy and difficult lump 

 to move. The chalk down here is hard, and his arm 

 cannot get free play, so that there is plenty of time to 

 talk ere it drops noiselessly on the soft grey dust. 

 Often, he says, he has mined down as far as this 

 without discovering a flint, and it is almost his only 



