Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/269

256 generally is about. Our world for that night is the black, stifling underground hole, where some two hundred men have just been slaughtered, not five miles from where we sit—for the rumour has become an awful certainty.

The next day I am one of some thousands who flock to this great black burial-ground. As I drive up a slope leading to it, I find the road almost impassable from the crowd who throng round me; and I notice how difficult it seems to be to realise the presence of wholesale death: for the crowd, as they press on—parties of colliers from neighbouring mines (and the Burnslay colliers are not a refined set)—laughing, swearing, and jesting, as they shamble along with the bow-legged stride which thin coal-seam men so often have, and which results from their being compelled from their childhood to work in and walk about passages only four or five feet high; young men and their sweethearts, the former with the slangy bright neckerchief common to the Burnslay district; taciturn old agricultural labourers; and shrill women, each with one baby at least;—all are evidently intent upon enjoying their “out,” and chaff one another as they go, and chatter, and buy gingerbread and oranges from the hucksters who—knowing rascals!—have set up their stalls and are reaping rich harvests from this unannounced fair. But scarcely one of all this crowd seems to have a thought left for the awful cause of the assembly, or for those that lie in such numbers beneath his very feet!

Yes; there are some who feel. As I pass to the summit of the hill, where, in the midst of a large circle kept clear by a body of police, are a few buildings, a large smoking hole in the ground, and some rough wooden frameworks, some wheels, and other machinery, I pass a long row of low plain cottages. In most of these the blinds are drawn down, and the doors shut; for in almost all of them is a widowed wife, a childless mother, or a fatherless child; and fortunate is that family which has not lost more than one of its most valuable members: for these are the dwellings of the miners; and those drawn blinds conceal the anguish of wives, mothers, and children, whose dearest relations have within the last twenty-four hours been blown ruthlessly to destruction.

As the noisy, merry, thoughtless crowd rolls me along with it, I catch here and there a glimpse of a face through the crevice of a door or window. God grant I may never see such faces again! Their expression is not that of bitter or noisy grief, or of helpless resignation, but generally of vacant white bewilderment. The shock has been too great for ordinary grief, and they are only now preparing to settle down into an intelligible sorrow which may weep and be consolable: at present they scarcely understand why they mourn, or why this great fair is being held round them. Poor things! they will know when they wake from their dream, and find their bread-earners dead.

By favour I make my way into the empty circle, and find how matters now stand. The pit is on fire! It is uncertain whether the men who were in the distant parts of the workings were killed in the great blast of the gas; but it is certain that that blast has destroyed the ventilation, blown down the brattices, or partitions, and set the coal on fire, and that all must die soon, for no mortal hand can save them now. Human effort has done what was possible; and all honour be to those brave men who, shortly after the catastrophe, descended the fiery pit by the half-destroyed machinery, and saved the few scared stragglers, collected the wounded or unhurt at the bottom, and who, penetrating further into the mine, would have done more, had not the flames driven them, scorched and breathless, with their own lives in imminent danger, to the pit top again.

No escape now! All that can be done is to try and save the colliery from total destruction, and pray that the workers may have been blown to pieces at once, rather than reserved for the lingering fate in store for them, if alive.

To understand how matters now stand, I inquire into the nature of the underground workings of the colliery, and this is what I learn:—

I learn that the pit, at the mouth of which I stand, and by which the great engine raises and lowers the men and the coals, communicates at its bottom with the passages and levels (technically, boardgates) through the coal, and by which it is got. These passages extend, in different ramifications, for many hundreds of yards, some of them sloping downwards from the pit bottom into the lower side of the seam of coal, or “on the dip;” but the majority rising into its higher side, or “on the rise.” Some forty yards from this pit, on the lower side, is another one, where a powerful pumping engine keeps the colliery free from the water, which would otherwise rapidly accumulate.

A very few yards from the pit where I stand, and on the higher side, is a third, from which a stifling, sulphurous smoke is rising through the interstices of the iron rails with which, placed across and covered with clay, it is temporarily stopped. This is the ventilating shaft, at the bottom of which, when the colliery is in work, a furnace has been kept constantly burning, the heat of which causes a very powerful ascending draft in it, so that the whole of the air for the miners is drawn down the adjoining shaft and up this one by the force of the current.

But though these two shafts, or pits, are so near one another, the volume of air which is drawn from one to the other has to pass through the whole of the workings and passages of the colliery in its course. This is effected by building up a stoppage in the immediate and direct passage between the two pits, and directing the current of air through its proper course by means of partitions, or brattices, which are temporarily erected for the purpose where necessary.

Having learnt thus much, I begin to see how poor the chance of rescue became for the unhappy prisoners when the flames made way. For the force of the explosion has knocked down the main partition between the two shafts, and has set fire to the stables which are close to the furnaces.

The consequence is, that the flame fed by the straw and woodwork, and by an unlimited supply of air down the main shaft (now in free