r below
him and the journey appeared interminable. The light of the little lamp,
which had nearly gone out, grew suddenly brighter. Around him
innumerable springs were trickling, running and descending on all sides.
Here and there uniting in large streams, they came down in cascades,
splashing Ivan's clothes. The darkness was full of the babbling, rushing
and noise of this water.

The old man knew that for sixty years it had been ceaselessly
undermining this shaft. Long ago, when he first went down it, only a few
drops of water used to filter through its sides. Later on these became
more numerous, and collecting together, finished by channelling for
themselves convenient passages and by flowing in streams. By this time
the work of destruction had become more and more threatening and the
earth was everywhere like a sponge. It seemed as though the springs
imprisoned in the mountain had found out the existence of this shaft and
had united to flow into it.

"They will certainly end by flooding the shaft," thought the old man.
"What is to be done? One can only hope in God. As long as He wills, the
shaft will exist, but as soon as He does not will it, it will be
destroyed from top to bottom."

Formerly the shaft was supported by the rocks, but the water had
succeeded in undermining them, sometimes by infiltration underneath
them, sometimes by dislodging them from their places and making them
lose their equilibrium; some of them projected through the walls of the
shaft and their sides were black with moisture. Presently these
undermined rocks would collapse, dragging down in their fall all the
surrounding earth. What a disaster it would be. The miners would be
buried alive like earth-worms. Only their feet would be visible, thought
the old man, as had been the case with his mother. "Entombed by the will
of God." It would be no use digging and trying to reach them; they would
be too far down; the shaft was three hundred fathoms deep and the whole
mine was dangerous. The walls of its galleries were as thin as those of
a bee-hive. So much ore had been extracted from it that entire caves had
been formed in the spongy earth. Whenever the shaft should collapse, the
walls of the galleries would not hold out any more, the whole mine would
fall in, and nothing would be left but an enormous cavity to show the
curious sightseer.

The old man regarded the prospect of such a collapse calmly, for to die
in a mine seemed to him quite na