“The gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, nearly seven hundred miners who were now at work inside this giant anthill, all burrowing into the earth and riddling it with holes, like an old piece of wood being eaten away by woodworm. And in the heavy silence created by the crushing mass of earth it was possible to put an ear to the rock and hear the teeming activity of human insects on the march, from the whirr of the cables rising and falling as the cages took the coal to the surface to the grinding of tools as they bit into the seam deep within each working.”