AN UNDERGROUND EXCURSION 139 



CHAPTER XIII. 



AN UNDERGROUND EXCURSION. 



FOUR hundred feet beneath the foundations of the city, 

 with its piles of brick, and marble, and iron — beneath 

 the roots of the oaken forest and its Dodonean colonnades 

 — beneath the bed of the flowing river and its freight of 

 animated hulls — down four hundred feet beneath the light 

 of the nineteenth century, guided only by the glimmer of 

 the oil lamp suspended from his smutty cap, the miner 

 works the coal which blazes in the cheerful grate, or 

 wakes the slumbering energy which drives the monster 

 steamer on the stormy wave. Let us enter the yawning 

 avenue to this subterranean world. [See Appendix, Note 



v.] 



Armed each with a miner's lamp, and clad in a miner's 

 garb borrowed for the occasion, we step upon a platform, 

 or "cage," six feet square, suspended by iron rods connect- 

 ed with machinery moved by an 'engine, and, at the word, 

 begin to sink into the gulf of blackness beneath us. This 

 perpendicular hole, perhaps eight feet square, is called the 

 " shaft." By the light of the outer world thrown into the 

 mouth of the chasm, we perceive that the shaft passes at 

 first through a few feet of sand and gravel. Lower down 

 the darkness of the pit enshrouds us, but we learn by the 

 gleam of the lamps that we are passing through fifty feet 

 of coal-black shales, which, like the sandy beds above, are 

 held in their places by a frame of planks. We next find 

 ourselves in the middle of an aperture through a bed of 

 limestone perhaps twenty-five feet thick. The walls are 



