A mile from the entrance the train reached the breast where McTeague’s gang worked.  The men clambered from the cars and took up the labor where the day shift had left it, burrowing their way steadily through a primeval river bed.

The candlesticks thrust into the crevices of the gravel strata lit up faintly the half dozen moving figures befouled with sweat and with wet gray mould.  The picks struck into the loose gravel with a yielding shock.  The long-handled shovels clinked amidst the piles of bowlders and scraped dully in the heaps of rotten quartz.  The Burly drill boring for blasts broke out from time to time in an irregular chug-chug, chug-chug, while the engine that pumped the water from the mine coughed and strangled at short intervals.

McTeague tended the chuck.  In a way he was the assistant of the man who worked the Burly.  It was his duty to replace the drills in the Burly, putting in longer ones as the hole got deeper and deeper.  From time to time he rapped the drill with a pole-pick when it stuck fast or fitchered.

Once it even occurred to him that there was a resemblance between his present work and the profession he had been forced to abandon.  In the Burly drill he saw a queer counterpart of his old-time dental engine; and what were the drills and chucks but enormous hoe excavators, hard bits, and burrs?  It was the same work he had so often performed in his “Parlors,” only magnified, made monstrous, distorted, and grotesqued, the caricature of dentistry.

He passed his nights thus in the midst of the play of crude and simple forces—­the powerful attacks of the Burly drills; the great exertions of bared, bent backs overlaid with muscle; the brusque, resistless expansion of dynamite; and the silent, vast, Titanic force, mysterious and slow, that cracked the timbers supporting the roof of the tunnel, and that gradually flattened the lagging till it was thin as paper.

The life pleased the dentist beyond words.  The still, colossal mountains took him back again like a returning prodigal, and vaguely, without knowing why, he yielded to their influence—­their immensity, their enormous power, crude and blind, reflecting themselves in his own nature, huge, strong, brutal in its simplicity.  And this, though he only saw the mountains at night.  They appeared far different then than in the daytime.  At twelve o’clock he came out of the mine and lunched on the contents of his dinner-pail, sitting upon the embankment of the track, eating with both hands, and looking around him with a steady ox-like gaze.  The mountains rose sheer from every side, heaving their gigantic crests far up into the night, the black peaks crowding together, and looking now less like beasts than like a company of cowled giants.  In the daytime they were silent; but at night they seemed to stir and rouse themselves.  Occasionally the stamp-mill stopped, its thunder ceasing abruptly.  Then one could hear the noises that the mountains made in their living.  From the canyon, from the crowding crests, from the whole immense landscape, there rose a steady and prolonged sound, coming from all sides at once.  It was that incessant and muffled roar which disengages itself from all vast bodies, from oceans, from cities, from forests, from sleeping armies, and which is like the breathing of an infinitely great monster, alive, palpitating.