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MEN AND MINES
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der—twenty
feet straight up. The flickering little flames finally pierce the
darkness of a cavern twenty feet wide, fifty feet long, and as high as
a tall man. This is the top of that rock pile. Standing on it are two
miners. One is drilling into the roof of solid rock, and his air drill
is hammering away with a chattering roar.
You
cannot make out this man's features: he is just a dark bulk behind a
shining spot of light fixed to his hat. Now he is finished. There are a
dozen small, clean holes in the roof. Each is carefully packed with the
little cartridges of dynamite, wrapped in their neat wax-paper jackets.
The drill is dismounted and taken down the pole-road. Wires are
connected, and you consider it wise to retire to the drift below. The
last to come down the ladder are the two dusky workers. They connect
their wires to a strange-looking box with a handle on it. A sharp twist
of the handle, a muffled thud from above and a stream of smoke coming
down the pole-road—and now the man with his little steel car will have
more work to do.
This
is the operation of "stoping," and the stope is the dark cavern which
the miners are hewing from the blue rock. Day after day they will
repeat their work, until one day they will go up the pole-road after a
blast to find that the roof has caved in and the waste rock from the
level above has filled up their stope. Then all that remains is to load
up the rest of the blue from below. The miners will be sent to a new
place and start the operation all over again.
Everything
is done systematically. The drifts are driven a certain distance apart
to the far side of the pipe; the stopes are regularly spaced, leaving
pillars of rock between. Then the pillars are blasted out, and finally
the rock over the drift is "sliced back" in such a way that no caving
takes place between the miners and their avenue of escape—the shaft.
(33)
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