intended to make two holes, one on
each side, and the two holes were to meet in the middle; nobody believed
that this was possible, for the tunnel was to be nearly nine miles long.
Nearly nine miles!

And what would happen if they did not meet? Well, they would have to
begin again at the beginning.

But the engineer-in-chief had assured them that they would meet.

Andrea, on the Italian side, had faith in the engineer-in-chief, and
since he was himself a very capable fellow, as we know, he applied for
work under him and soon was made a foreman.

Andrea liked his work. He no longer saw daylight, the green fields and
snow-clad Alps. But he fancied that he was cutting a way for himself
through the mountain to Gertrude, the way which he had boasted he would
come.

For eight years he stood in darkness, living the life of a dog, stripped
to the waist, for he was working in a temperature of a hundred degrees.
Now the way was blocked by a spring, and he had to work standing in the
water; now by a deposit of loam, and he stood almost knee-deep in
the mire; the atmosphere was nearly always foul, and many of his
fellow-labourers succumbed to it; but new ones were ever ready to take
their place. Finally Andrea, too, succumbed, and was taken into the
hospital. He was tortured by the idea that the two tunnels would never
meet. Supposing they never met!

There were also men from the other side in the hospital; and at
times, when they were not delirious, they would ask one another the
all-absorbing question: "Would they meet?"

The people from the South had never before been so anxious to meet the
people from the North as they were now, deep down in the heart of the
mountain. They knew that if they met, their feud of over a thousand
years' standing would be over, and they would fall into each other's
arms, reconciled.

Andrea recovered and returned to work; he was in the strike of 1875,
threw a stone, and underwent a term of imprisonment.

In the year 1877 his native village, Airolo, was destroyed by fire.

"Now I have burnt my boats behind me," he said, "there is no going
back--I must go on."

The 19th of July 1879 was a day of mourning. The engineer-in-chief had
gone into the mountain to measure and to calculate; and, all absorbed
in his work, he had had a stroke and died. Died with his race only half
run! He ought to have been buried where he fell, in a more gigantic
stone pyramid than any of the Egyptian Pharaohs had