, 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.

McTeague returned to his work. At six in the morning his shift was taken
off, and he went out of the mine and back to the bunk house. All day
long he slept, flung at length upon the strong-smelling blankets--slept
the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, crushed and overpowered with the
work, flat and prone upon his belly, till again in the evening the cook
sounded the alarm upon the crowbar bent into a triangle.

Every alternate we