And so the quintette, in grim harmony of enterprise, go down, down, down, like so many human buckets, into a bottomless well.

Alas, and alas! our own arms, with their as yet untried muscles, must be our only windlass to bring us to the surface again!  Down, down, down, deeper, deeper, deeper!  Will this first ladder never end?

Ah, at last!  At the foot, on either side, stand the Captain and the Colonel, like sentries.  We have reached a shelf of rock, and we may rest.  Here we perch ourselves, like sea-birds on a precipice that overlooks the sea.

By the light of our flickering candles we behold each other’s faces, and we can talk together.  We are but two hundred feet under ground.  A desolate stillness reigns here; no sound reaches us, either of labor or the steps of passing workmen.  A cold stream of water trickles from a cleft rock behind us; we bathe our foreheads in it, and betake ourselves to the ladder again.

From our next resting-place we proceed through a gallery, an exhausted vein, kept open as a passage from one shaft to another.  As we turn a corner, we seem to plunge into a rocky cavern; our feet tread on roughly imbedded rocks; the sides of the cave jut out in refuse boulders,—­harsh, dark-colored, ashen; overhead are beams of hard wood, bracing and strengthening the excavation.  We traverse this gallery hastily.

Now that we are here, we are conscious of excitement. Mon Amie manifests hers by her steady, deliberate tones, a sort of exaltation foreign to her usually vibrating voice, her tremulous cadences; she seems borne along, despite and above herself.  For my own part, as my lungs inflate themselves with this pure, dry, bracing air, exquisitely redolent of health, and testifying at once to a total exemption from noxious exhalations or mephitic vapors, I grow tete-montee, rattle-brained; my laugh echoes through these stony chambers, wild snatches of song hover on my lips, odd conceits flit through my brain, I joke, I dash forward with haste; my excitement endows me with a superfeminine self-possession.

But now we hear an ominous rattle, a clanking of chains, a rumbling as of distant thunder; we are approaching a shaft.  The shafts in this mine are not sunk perpendicularly, but are slightly inclined:  the huge buckets, lowered and raised by means of powerful machinery, are but ancient caldrons, counterparts of those in which the weird witches in “Macbeth” might have brewed their unholy decoctions, or such as the dreadful giants that formed the nightmare of my childhood might have used in preparing those Brobdignagian repasts among the ingredients of which a plump child held the same rank as a crab in ours.