cries
aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand
closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above
the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and
disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck
elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man. The earth,
permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the
guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to
these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in
the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this
sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a
certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a
fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis? It is the quicksands of
the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth; it is
the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil is in a
state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft
medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very
great. Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If the
water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up; if earth
predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of
the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried
in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead
of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation
by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
cl