by Emile Zola
Négrel was obliged to admit defeat and pulled on the rope in order to be returned to the surface. But then he signalled for another stop. He was still amazed by how suddenly the disaster had occurred, and he did not understand why. He wanted to find out, and started examining the pieces of tubbing that were still intact. From a distance he had been surprised by the scratches and dents in the wood. His lamp had almost gone out because of the wet, and so he felt around with his fingers and was able to make out very easily the saw marks and the drill holes, the whole, ghastly process of destruction. Quite clearly someone had wanted this disaster to happen. As he stared open-mouthed, these last pieces gave way and plunged down the shaft, frames and all, in a final moment of disintegration that nearly took him with it. His courage had vanished, and the thought of the man who had done this made his hair stand on end, chilling the blood in his veins with the awestruck dread of evil, as if the man were still there, like some monstrous presence in all this darkness, a witness to his own inordinate crime. He screamed and pulled frantically on the rope. And it was high time he did so, for he noticed that a hundred metres above him the upper tubbing was starting to show signs of movement: the joints were opening up and the caulking beginning to give way, releasing streams of water. It was now only a matter of hours before the mine-shaft would lose its entire tubbing and cave in completely.
On the surface M. Hennebeau was anxiously waiting for Négrel.
‘Well? How does it look?’ he asked.
But the engineer could not get the words out. He was on the point of collapse.
‘It’s just not possible. Really, it’s quite unheard of…Did you have a good look?’
Yes, Négrel nodded, glancing round warily. He did not want to explain further while some of the deputies were listening, and he led his uncle some ten metres away and then, having judged the distance insufficient, further away still. Speaking very softly in his ear, he told him about the sabotage, how the planks had been sawn and drilled, how the pit had had its throat slit and was now breathing its last. M. Hennebeau turned very pale and also lowered his voice, instinctively respecting the silence that attends the monstrousness of great crimes or wanton acts of immorality. There was no point in appearing to be frightened in front of Montsou’s ten thousand miners: they would reflect on the consequences later. And the two men continued to whisper together, appalled by the thought that any man could have found the courage to go down the shaft, hang there in the void, and risk his life twenty times over in order to carry out this dreadful deed. They could not begin to grasp this mad bravery in the cause of destruction, and they refused to believe it, despite the evidence, just as people refuse to believe the stories of famous escapes and prisoners who must have sprouted wings and flown from windows that are thirty metres up.
When M. Hennebeau walked back over to the deputies, his face was twitching nervously. With a gesture of helplessness he gave the order for the pit to be evacuated at once. Everyone departed mournfully as though they were at a funeral, silently abandoning the place while glancing back from time to time at the large, empty buildings, still standing there but now beyond salvation.
The manager and the engineer were the last to leave the pit-head, and the crowd greeted them with its noisy chant:
‘Give us the names! Give us the names!’
La Maheude had now arrived to join the other women. She remembered the noise in the night: her daughter and the lodger must have left together, and they were down there for certain. Having initially screamed that it was a good job and that the heartless cowards deserved to stay there, she had then rushed to the scene and was now standing in the front row, shivering with apprehension. In any case, she no longer dared to doubt the fact, as she realized from listening to the discussion going on around her about the identity of those still down there. Yes, yes, Catherine was one of them, and Étienne too; a comrade had seen them. But opinion was still divided as to the others. No, no, not him, more likely that other chap, or perhaps Chaval, even though one of the pit-boys swore blind he’d come up with him. La Levaque and La Pierronne had nobody in danger but shouted and wailed as loudly as the rest of the women. Zacharie had been one of the first up and, despite his usual air of cynicism, had embraced his wife and mother in tears. Having remained by La Maheude’s side, he was sharing in her trembling anxiety and displaying unexpected depths of affection for his sister, refusing to believe that she was down there until management officially confirmed the fact.
‘Give us the names! For God’s sake, tell us the names!’
Négrel shouted crossly at the supervisors in a loud voice:
‘Make them be quiet, for God’s sake. Things are bad enough as they are. We don’t know the damned names yet.’
Two hours had already gone by. In the initial panic nobody had thought of the other shaft, the old one at Réquillart. M. Hennebeau was just announcing that they were going to try and mount a rescue attempt from that direction when the word went round that five men had just escaped the flooding by climbing up the rickety ladders in the disused escape shaft. The name of Mouque was mentioned, which caused some surprise since nobody had thought he was down there. But the story told by the five who had escaped brought further tears; fifteen comrades had been unable to follow them, having lost their way after being blocked by rock-falls. It would be impossible to rescue them now, for Réquillart was flooded to a depth of ten metres. They knew the names of all of them, and the air was filled with anguished lament as though an entire people had been slaughtered.
‘For God’s sake, tell them to be quiet!’ Négrel repeated furiously. ‘And make them stand back. Yes, yes, a hundred metres back. It’s dangerous here. Push them back, push them back!’
The poor people had to be driven back by force. They in turn imagined fresh horrors and thought that this was an attempt to conceal further deaths from them; the deputies had to explain that the shaft was about to swallow up the entire mine. This prospect shocked them into silence, and eventually they began to inch backwards; but the number of guards had to be doubled in order to contain them, for despite themselves they kept coming forward again, as though irresistibly drawn to the scene. A thousand people were milling about in the road, and people were still flocking from the villages, and even from Montsou itself. Meanwhile the man up above on the spoil-heap, the fair-skinned man with the girlish face, smoked cigarette after cigarette to pass the time, and his pale eyes never left the pit.
Then the waiting began. It was midday: nobody had eaten, yet nobody left. Rust-coloured clouds passed slowly overhead in the dirty grey, overcast sky. Behind Rasseneur’s hedge a large dog was barking fiercely, without respite, unsettled by this living, breathing crowd. The crowd itself had gradually spread out over the surrounding land and formed a circle around the pit at a distance of a hundred metres. At the centre of this empty space stood Le Voreux. Not a soul was left, not a sound was to be heard: it was deserted. The windows and doors had been left open, and through them one could see the abandoned interiors. A ginger cat, which had been left behind, sensing the danger in this solitude, leaped down from a stairway and fled. The boiler fires must have barely died down because small puffs of smoke continued to rise from the tall, brick chimney towards the dark clouds above; and the weathercock on the headgear squeaked in the wind with a small, shrill cry, a sad, lonely voice amid all these vast buildings that were about to perish.
Two o’clock, and still no movement. M. Hennebeau, Négrel and other engineers who had hurried to the pit stood around in front of the crowd in a huddle of frock-coats and black hats. They, too, could not tear themselves away, though their legs were weary and they felt ill, sick at heart to be the helpless witnesses of such a disaster, and exchanging only the occasional whisper, as though they were standing by the bed of a dying man. The upper tubbing must have been in the last stages of disintegration now because they could hear sudden bangs followed by the clatter of something falling a long way and then a long silence: the gaping wound was get
ting wider, and the process of collapse that had begun further down was now steadily rising to the surface. Négrel was gripped with nervous impatience and kept wanting to take a look; and he was beginning to walk forward alone into that terrifying, empty space when they all grabbed him by the shoulders. What was the point? There was nothing he could do. Meanwhile a miner, one of the old hands, had got past the guards and raced across to the changing-room. But he calmly reappeared, having merely gone to fetch his clogs.
Three o’clock came. Still nothing. A shower of rain had soaked the crowd, but it had not retreated one step. Rasseneur’s dog had started barking again. And it was not until about twenty past three that the earth was shaken with the first tremor. Le Voreux shook slightly, but it was stoutly built and held firm. But a second shock followed at once, and from the open mouths of the crowd came a long scream: the screening-shed with its pitch roof tottered twice and then came tumbling down with a terrible cracking sound. Under the enormous pressure the beams split and rubbed together so violently that they gave off showers of sparks. From then on the earth never ceased to shake, and there was tremor after tremor each time the ground shifted beneath the surface, like the rumblings of an erupting volcano. In the distance the dog had stopped barking and was now howling pitifully, as though heralding the shocks which it knew to be coming; and the women and children, indeed everybody who was watching, could not refrain from a cry of distress each time they felt the earth move beneath them. In less than ten minutes the slate roof of the headgear fell in, the pit-head and the engine-house were split asunder, and a huge gap appeared in the wall. Then the noises stopped, the collapse halted, and once again there was a long silence.
For an hour Le Voreux remained like this, breached, as though it had been bombarded by some barbarian horde. The screaming had stopped, and the growing circle of onlookers simply watched. Beneath the pile of beams that had once been the screening-shed, they could see the shattered tipplers and the smashed and twisted hoppers. But the worst damage was at the pit-head, where bricks had come raining down and whole sections of wall had crumbled. The framework of iron girders that supported the winding-pulleys had given way, and half of it was now hanging down the shaft; one cage was suspended in mid-air, and a piece of severed cable was dangling loose; tubs, ladders, sheets of cast-iron flooring all lay in a jumbled heap. By some chance the lamp-room had remained intact, and one could see its bright rows of little lamps over to the left. And there at the far end of its demolished housing was the winding-engine, sitting foursquare on its plinth of masonry, its brasses gleaming, its thick steel rods looking like indestructible tendons, and its huge crank sticking up at an angle like the mighty knee of some recumbent giant reposing in the sure knowledge of his own strength.
Following this hour of respite, M. Hennebeau began to entertain some hope. The earth must have stopped shifting, they would be able to save the winding-engine and the remainder of the buildings. But he still forbade people to go near and wanted to give it another half-hour. The waiting was becoming unbearable, and the raised hopes made the anxiety worse; every heart was beating wildly. A dark cloud looming over the horizon was hastening the onset of dusk, and a sinister twilight began to fall on the wreckage left by the earth’s tumult. They had all been standing there for seven hours now, not moving, not eating.
And suddenly, just as the engineers were starting to edge forward, one last convulsion of the earth put them to flight. There was a whole series of underground explosions, as though some monstrous artillery were firing cannon in the void. On the surface the remaining buildings toppled over and crumpled to the ground. The ruins of the screening-shed and the pit-head were swallowed up in a kind of whirlpool. Then the boiler-house burst apart and vanished. Next it was the turn of the square tower where the drainage-pump used to pant away at its work; the tower fell flat on its face like a man hit by a bullet. And then came the terrifying spectacle of the winding-engine, now wrenched from its moorings, fighting for its life on spread-eagled limbs. It was on the move, stretching its crank – its giant’s knee – as though it were trying to struggle to its feet; but then it fell back dead, crushed, and was swallowed up by the earth. Now only the tall, thirty-metre chimney remained standing, shaking like a mast in a hurricane. It looked as though it might shatter into tiny pieces and be blown away like powder when suddenly it sank in one piece, absorbed into the ground, melted away like some colossal candle; and nothing visible remained, not even the tip of the lightning-conductor. It was all over: the vile beast squatting in its hollow in the ground, gorged on human flesh, had drawn the last of its long, slow, gasping breaths. Le Voreux had now vanished in its entirety down into the abyss.
The crowd fled, screaming. Women covered their eyes as they ran, and the men were swept along like a swirl of dead leaves by the sheer horror of the scene. They tried not to scream, but scream they did, with their arms in the air and their lungs bursting, at the sight of the vast hole that had opened up. Like the crater of some extinct volcano it stretched from the road as far as the canal, fifteen metres deep and at least forty metres wide. The whole pit-yard had gone the way of the buildings, the gigantic trestles, the overhead railway and all its track, an entire train of tubs, as well as three railway wagons, not to mention the store of pit-props, a forest of newly cut poles that had been swallowed up like so many straws. At the bottom of the crater all that could be seen was a tangled mass of wooden beams, bricks, ironwork and plaster, a dreadful array of wreckage that had been pounded, mangled and splattered with mud by the raging storm of catastrophe. And the hole was spreading: fissures ran from the edge of it far off into the surrounding fields. One stretched as far as Rasseneur’s public house, where there was a crack in the front wall. Was the whole village going to be engulfed as well? How far did they have to run to find safe ground, in this fearsome twilight and under a leaden sky that looked as though it, too, were bent on destroying the world?
But Négrel gave a cry of despair. M. Hennebeau, who had moved back, began to weep. The catastrophe was not over yet. The canal bank gave way, and a sheet of water started gushing out into one of the cracks in the ground. There it vanished, cascading like a waterfall into a deep valley. The mine drank the river down: its roads would be flooded for years to come. Soon the crater began to fill; and where once Le Voreux had been, there now lay an expanse of muddy water, like one of those lakes in which doomed cities lie submerged. A terrified silence had fallen, and all that could be heard was the sound of the water pouring down and rumbling through the bowels of the earth.
At that moment, up on the shaken spoil-heap, Souvarine rose to his feet. He had recognized La Maheude and Zacharie sobbing together at the spectacle of this collapse, the weight of which would be piling down on to the heads of those wretched people still fighting for their lives below. He threw away his last cigarette and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie’s final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.
IV
That very night, following the collapse of Le Voreux, M. Hennebeau had left for Paris, wanting to inform the Board in person before the newspapers had had a chance to report even the bare details of the event. And when he returned the next day, people found him very calm, quite the manager in charge. He had evidently succeeded in absolving himself of all responsibility and seemed to be no less in favour than before; indeed the decree appointing him Officer in the Legion of Honour was signed twenty-four hours later.
But while the manager’s position was safe, the Company itself was reeling from this terrible blow. It was not so much the loss of money that mattered as the injury to its corporate body and the na
gging, unspoken fear, in the light of this attack on one of its pits, of what the morrow might bring. Once again the shock was so great that it felt the need for silence. Why cause a stir over this abominable act? Even if they were to identify the criminal responsible, why make a martyr of him? His appalling heroism would serve only to give others the wrong idea and breed a long line of incendiaries and assassins. In any case it did not suspect the real culprit and eventually laid the blame on an army of accomplices, as it could not believe that one man alone could have had the courage and daring to carry out such a deed. And that precisely was what worried the Company most: the thought that its pits might now be under a growing threat. The manager had been instructed to set up an extensive network of informants and then quietly, one by one, to dismiss the troublemakers who were suspected of having had a hand in the crime. A purge of this kind, being the wisest political course to take, would suffice.