GERMINAL
in length, followed one another, some still firm, others shaky, yielding and almost broken; the steps were narrow and green, so rotten that one seemed to walk in moss; and the heat of an oven proceeding from the air-shaft which was, fortunately, not very active now the strike was on, for when the furnace devoured its five thousand kilogrammes of coal a day, one could not have risked oneself there without roasting one's hair.
"What a damned little toad!" exclaimed Étienne in a stifled voice, "where the devil is he going to?"
Twice he had nearly fallen. His feet slid over the damp wood. If he had only had a candle like the child! but he struck himself every minute; he was only guided by the vague gleam that fled beneath him. He had already reached the twentieth ladder, and the descent still continued. Then he counted them: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and he still went down and down. His head seemed to be swelling with the heat and the thought that he was falling into a furnace. At last he reached a landing-place, and he saw the candle going off along the gallery. Thirty ladders, that made about two hundred and ten mètres.
"Is he going to drag me about long?" he thought. "He must be going to bury himself in the stable."
But on the left, the path which led to the stable was closed by a landslip. The journey began again, now more painful and more dangerous. Frightened bats flew about and clung to the roof of the gallery. He had to hasten so as not to lose sight of the light; only where the child passed with ease, with the suppleness of a serpent, he could not glide through without bruising his limbs. This gallery, like all the older passages, was narrow, and grew narrower every day from the constant fall of soil; at certain places it was a mere tube which would eventually be effaced. In this strangling labour the torn and broken wood became a peril, threatening to saw into his flesh, or to run him through with the points of splinters, sharp as swords. He could only advance with precaution, on his knees or belly, feeling in the darkness before him. Suddenly a band of rats stamped over him, running from his neck to his feet in their galloping flight.
"Blast it all! haven't we got to the end yet?" he grumbled, with aching back and out of breath.
They were there. At the end of a kilomètre the tube en-
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