That morning I was given a new job. The boss led the way, candle in hand, a half mile back through the bowels of the mountain, winding with the swinging of the former ore vein. This alone was enough to get hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind-alley branches. Now and then we came upon another shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole a few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far down which came up the falsetto voices and the stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of heavy hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only started. Far back in the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred feet more, then wound off again through the mountain by more labyrinthian burrowings in the rock, winding, undulating passages, often so low we must crawl on hands and knees, with no other light than the flickering candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, copper-colored beings; the shadows giving them often fiendish faces and movements, until we could easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's imagination. In time we came to a ladder leading upward into a narrow dark hole, and when the ladder ended we climbed on our bellies some forty feet higher up a ledge of rock to another "heading." Along this we made our way another hundred yards or more to where a dozen naked peons were operating compressed-air drills, then wormed our way like snakes over the resultant debris to the present end of the passage, where more peons were drilling by hand, one man holding a bar of iron a few feet long which another was striking with a five-pound sledge that luckily never missed its mark. This was indeed working in Mexico. It would have been difficult to get farther into it; and a man could not but dully wonder if he would ever get out again.
We were evidently very close to the infernal regions. Here, indeed, would have been a splendid setting for an orthodox hell. Peons whose only garment was the size of a postcard, some even with their hats off, glistened all over their brown bodies as under a shower-bath. In five minutes I had sweated completely through my garments, in ten I could wring water out of my jacket; drops fell regularly at about half-second intervals from the end of my nose and chin. The dripping sweat formed puddles beneath the toilers, the air was so scarce and second-hand every breath was a deep gasp; nowhere a sign of exit, as if we had been walled up in this narrow, low-ceiled, jagged-rock passageway for all time.
