od boils in your
veins from the fervent heat; you are never allowed to rest. You are put
in every kind of contortion to get at it, your limbs twisted, and your
muscles strained.'

'For what?' I said.

'For gold!' he cried with a flash in his eyes--'gold! There it is
inexhaustible; however hard you may work, there is always more, and
more!'

'And to whom does all that belong?' I said. 'To whoever is strong enough
to get hold and keep possession,--sometimes one, sometimes another. The
only thing you are sure of is that it will never be you.'

Why not I as well as another? was the thought that went through my mind,
and my new companion spied it with a shriek of derision.

'It is not for you nor your kind,' he cried. 'How do you think you could
force other people to serve _you_? Can you terrify them or hurt them, or
give them anything? You have not learned yet who are the masters here.'

This troubled me, for it was true. 'I had begun to think,' I said, 'that
there was no authority at all,--for every man seems to do as he pleases;
you ride over one, and knock another down, or you seize a living man and
cut him to pieces'--I shuddered as I thought of it--'and there is nobody
to interfere.'

'Who should interfere?' he said. 'Why shouldn't every man amuse himself
as he can? But yet for all that we've got our masters,' he cried with a
scowl, waving his clinched fist in the direction of the mines; 'you'll
find it out when you get there.'

It was a long time after this before I ventured to move, for here it
seemed to me that for the moment I was safe,--outside the city, yet not
within reach of the dangers of that intermediate space which grew clearer
before me as my eyes became accustomed to the lurid threatening afternoon
light. One after another the fugitives came flying past me,--people who
had escaped from the armed bands whom I could now see on the watch near
the pit's mouth. I could see too the tactics of these bands,--how they
retired, veiling the lights and the opening, when a greater number than
usual of travellers appeared on the way, and then suddenly widening out,
throwing out flanking lines, surrounded and drew in the unwary. I could
even hear the cries with which their victims disappeared over the opening
which seemed to go down into the bowels of the earth. By and by there
came flying towards me a wretch more dreadful in aspect than any I had
seen. His scanty clothes seemed singed and burned into rags; his