iery directors stood about. A
carriage-horse champed its bit, and the still watchers turned at once
to that intrusive sound. Around us, a lucid winter landscape (for it
had been raining) ran to the distant encompassing hills which lifted
like low ramparts of cobalt and amethyst to a sky of luminous saffron
and ice-green, across which leaden clouds were moving. The country had
that hard, coldly radiant appearance which always impresses a sad man
as this world's frank expression of its alien disregard; this world not
his, on which he has happened, and must endure with his trouble for a
brief time.

As I went through the press of people to the colliery gates, the women
in shawls turned to me, first with annoyance that their watching should
be disturbed, and then with some dull interest. My assured claim to
admittance probably made them think I was the bearer of new help
outside their little knowledge; and they willingly made room for me to
pass. I felt exactly like the interfering fraud I was. What would I not
have given then to be made, for a brief hour, a nameless
miracle-worker.

In the colliery itself was the same seeming apathy. There was nothing
to show in that yard, black with soddened cinders and ash muck, where
the new red-brick engine-houses stood, that somewhere half a mile
beneath our feet were thirty men, their only exit to the outer world
barred by a subterranean fire. Nothing showed of the fire but a whitish
smoke from a ventilating shaft; and a stranger would not know what that
signified. But the women did. Wet with the rain showers, they had been
standing watching that smoke all night, and were watching it still, for
its unceasing pour to diminish. Constant and unrelenting, it streamed
steadily upward, as though it drew its volume from central fires that
would never cease.

The doors of the office were thrown open, and three figures emerged.
They broke into the listlessness of that dreary place, where nothing
seemed to be going on, with a sudden real purpose, fast but unhurried,
and moved towards the shaft. Three Yorkshire rescue experts--one of
them to die later--with the Hamstead manager explaining the path they
should follow below with eager seriousness. "Figures of fun"! They had
muzzles on their mouths and noses, goggles on their eyes, fantastic
helms, and queer cylinders and bags slung about them. As they went up
the slope of wet ash, quick and full of purpose, their comical gear and
coarse dress