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A Pictorial Walk Through
the 20th
Century
Eight Days In A Burning Mine
ecuring picks and shovels, we started to build the structure which was to be the means of our preservation. Rocks broken from the wall and floor, and clay to fill the cracks, formed the materials for the work, and it rose gradually until only a small space remained to be filled at the top. We worked feverishly, inspired by the thought that we were fighting for our lives, although few of us expected the wall to avail against the deadly gas. Like drowning men clinging to a straw we worked at it for an hour. Some of the men, exhausted and overcome by the gas forming around us, fell fainting to the ground. It seemed for a while that we would be too weak to finish the work, but we kept at it doggedly and finally the last niche was closed and a solid mass stood between us and the black-damp. Already the air about us seemed purer and we became imbued with a feeling that the wall would save us.
The
space which we had thus walled in, literally burying ourselves alive as it seemed to us, was
about three hundred feet long and twelve feet wide. The air in here had not yet been greatly
contaminated and was comparatively pure. We had nothing to eat or drink, and were already suffering extremely from thirst, but we had several lamps and oil enough to last for days, so that we thought there was no danger of being left in darkness. Eddy instructed us to put out all the lamps except one, not because we needed to be sparing of oil, but to keep the lights from consuming the small amount of air. Thus we passed Sunday night, sitting or lying about in different parts of the passage, waiting for we knew not what. I may have slept, and must have done so during that and the succeeding nights and days, but I do not remember ever closing my eyes. My remembrance of those days from Sunday to Saturday is of one long period of suffering from thirst and bad air, without sleep or other relief, now sitting down, now moving about, in never-ending monotony. The atmosphere was cold and damp, and one could not rest Iong on the ground without being chilled through and through. By walking about I kept my blood in circulation, and so managed to be quite warm.
Some time after we had walled ourselves in (it must have been on Monday morning) Eddy directed the men to search about the passage and see if they could find a wet place where, by tearing up the ground, we might make a reservoir in which the trickling moisture would collect, and so give us a small amount of water, which, if used sparingly, might relieve all of us a little. There are many such places in the floors of mines, and we were fortunate enough to find one in our passage. The water was stinted in quantity and of a bad taste, but it had to serve. It took an hour for a small swallow of water to collect in the hole which we hollowed out, and we took turns at drinking it, so that each man got only one small taste of water per day. Another method resorted to to relieve thirst was to chew the "Sunshine," a preparation for our lamps, which, after being chewed awhile, would become like gum and clear away the slimy, caked substance which collected on the roofs and sides of our mouths and on our tongues for lack of water. Some of the men chewed tobacco for the same purpose, but this only rendered the thirst more acute after the weed was gone.
Monday passed and Tuesday came, with the air becoming more impure and our thirst more acute every hour. At times one of the men would make a small opening in the wall leading to the outer passage and put his nose to the aperture to find out if the black-damp still lurked beyond the barrier. Sometimes he would stagger back from contact with the gas and the hole would be hastily closed up, but at other times fresh air would greet him, which showed us that the mine had been opened and the fan was in operation. This put new hope into our hearts, which, however, gave place to deeper gloom when the awful gas again began to pour through the opening.
As Tuesday night approached we noticed that the light of the lamp which we had burning was
becoming dim. It was a "carbine" lamp, and a new charge was placed in it but failed to remedy the fault. Smaller and smaller burned the tiny flame, until it finally began to sputter as though coal-dust were being thrown upon it. An oil-lamp was lighted, but behaved in the same manner. Then we knew that light would soon refuse to live in the impure air about us, that our large supply of oil would avail us nothing, and that we should be left in darkness despite our precautions.
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