He put on the boots, picked up the helmet, took the lantern out of the locker, wiped the dust off of it with his sleeve, and clipped it to the helmet. There were no batteries, so he looked in the next locker, which had one. He strapped the bulky lantern battery to his waist, then realized that it was drained: work had been halted for a year, after all. But he remembered where the lamp shop was, directly opposite the changing room, where in his youth female workers would spray the batteries with smoking sulfuric acid to charge them. That was impossible now; the lamp shop was shrouded in yellow sulfuric acid smoke. He solemnly put on the lamp-equipped helmet and walked over to a dust-covered mirror. There, in the flickering red light, he saw his father.

“Dad, I’ll go down below in your place,” he said with a smile, then strode out toward the smoking mouth of the shaft.

A helicopter pilot recalled later that during a low-altitude flyby of Shaft No. 2, a final sweep of the area, he thought he saw someone near the opening, a black silhouette against the red glow of the ground fire. The figure seemed to be heading down the shaft, but in the next instant there was only red light, and nothing else.

120 YEARS LATER
(A MIDDLE-SCHOOL STUDENT’S JOURNAL)

People really were dumb in the past, and they really had a tough time.

Do you know how I know? Today we visited the Mining Museum. What impressed me the most was this:

They had solid coal!

First, we had to put on weird clothing: there was a helmet, which had a light on it, connected by a wire to a rectangular object that we hung at our waists. I thought it was a computer at first (even if it was a little large), but it turned out to be a battery for the light. A battery that big could power a racing car, but they used it for a tiny light. We also put on tall rain boots. The teacher told us this was the uniform that early coal miners used for going down the mines. Someone asked what “down the mines” meant, and the teacher said we’d find out soon enough.

We boarded a metallic, small-gauge segmented vehicle, like an early train, only much smaller and powered by an overhead wire. The vehicle started up and soon we entered the black mouth of a cave. It was very dark inside, with only an occasional dim lamp above us. Our headlamps were weak as well, only enough to make out the faces right beside us. The wind was strong and whistled in our ears; it felt like we were dropping into an abyss.

“We’re going down the mine now, students!” the teacher said.