The gallery was coming empty now, few tallow lamps were burning, but the colliers were still yelling down at the ladders, and I heard from there the cries of children, the bawling shouts of overmen trying to get order. Only fire was needed to turn it into Hell. Took one look at Liam and staggered to the entrance to Number Six, snatching at a tallow lamp and holding it before me as I went down the incline. Terror was in me, sweat flooding over me. Reckoning by time she was half way through the switch road when the roof came down. A forest of pitprops here and I stumbled and hit myself against them in my swaying run down the line. Queer how you pray when you fear such loss – strange how God is neglected till the testing time, and there is no other with ears. The shouts and bedlam was dying behind me now as I plunged on, following the shimmer of the rails in the faltering light of the candle. The air was fetid here, heavy with dust. The roof was lower now, the walls with jutting biceps of rocks; ankle deep in water now. Stopping, I listened. No sound but the thumping of my heart and the trickling of water from above. I looked at the roof. Wide fissures were crazing it from wall to wall, dust cascading in sudden spurts from the pressure building up. Gaunt the shadows of the candle, only an inch or so of it left, the flame spluttering to the heavy air. Dank the smell that wafted then from some devil’s hole, and I knew that I was holding in my hand the flame of detonation. Fear struck, thumping as a fist, putting me against the wall, and I dropped to my knees, staring at the blackness ahead.
“Morfydd!”
Flung back in my face in countless echoes, reverberating down the gallery, bouncing off the drop. The roof cracked like a shot behind me, the pressure begging for the least vibration to bring it roaring down. Couldn’t even shout without reprisal. Spitting out dust, I lurched on.
Narrow here. The gallery was tapering. This is the hardest rock, its walls as filed from the body of the mountain, the roof still lower. Had to bend here, now go on all fours, with the candle held out, one hand gripping a line, and this was the beginning of the fall. Boulders of rock and coal were strewn over the narrow floor, coming thicker as I crept onward, stumbling, cursing as my knees pressed the flints. Had to rest, for my head was thumping with the hammer of my heart and each breath was drawn against the iron band of my chest. As a dog, I rested, tongue lolling, panting, hearing as if in dreams a dull roll of thunder far behind me, and the floor beneath me trembled to the new drop. As alive the rail sprang under my hand, transmitting its message of entombment for someone. Perhaps me. I did not really give it a thought. Past caring now: had to find Morfydd. The candle was spilling its tallow now, the wick hooked and black for the last minutes of flame, guttering, sparking. On again, the boulders coming thicker till the line disappeared. Crying aloud, I wept as a child weeps in all its tuneless sounds as I set the lamp down and clawed a path up the drop. It seemed a mountain but it was only three feet, for my head struck the roof, knocking me back. This was the end of it, this was the fall.
Turning on my back I lay against the heap with the floor at my heels and the roof against my forehead, eyes closed to the scald of the tears, hands clenched to the loss. This is the end of it then, as she had said, engrained as the leaf; becoming part of the living earth, buried alive in the filth of coal for the profits of industry and the greed of men. The candle was chittering, opening my eyes to its incandescent fire in the blackness of the pit. Didn’t care now if I lived or died. Hope sprang then, shivering me awake in brief excitement, weighing the chances that she was beyond the fall, but I knew she was not. A gallery fall this, running as the drop of a stick; no isolated plug that she might have missed. I knew she was lost. And I saw in the seconds before the candle spat out a silver strand of shining braid, hanging from the splintered tip of a wooden prop, and stretched towards it and caught it in my fingers, pulling it down.
Blackness.
I put it against my face.
Gower came in for me, led by Muldooney, they said after, but I do not remember; with a twenty foot burrow through the drop I had heard, up by the start of the switch; hewing like madman, stark naked, some of them, sweating, bleeding, dropping with exhaustion to rise and hew again. God, these colliers!
Came in for me, ten men risking their lives
