1Now hear how the fire went under the ground.
2In the days before this book, a man who had been sold stood up and said that no one may own another, and a woman said that a mind is a mind. Their cry was still in the air when the new century opened. And the century answered it strangely, for it had found a new servant that was no person at all. The servant was fire, shut in iron.
3In the north of England, along the river Tyne, the earth was black inside. Men had dug coal there since before their grandfathers' time. They sent it up the shaft in baskets, and ships carried it to London, to warm the houses of people who never asked where it came from.
4The deeper they dug, the more the water came in. So at the head of every deep pit stood a fire engine. That was its name in those days: an engine worked by fire. It had a boiler like a great kettle and a beam like the arm of a giant. Day and night the beam went up and came down, and lifted water out of the dark.
5The man who kept the engine at one such pit was Matthew Reay. He was sixty years old and deaf in one ear from the noise of it. He fed it coal. He eased its valves. He listened with his good ear to its breathing. And he kept a slate.
6On the slate he wrote two counts. How many baskets of coal the engine ate. How many fathoms of water it raised. He had kept those counts for thirty years, and they troubled him.
7"It is a hungry beast," he would say. "It eats a hill to drink a pond." For he had reckoned that of all the heat in the coal, only a small part came out at the beam as lifting. The rest went up the chimney with the smoke, and out of the waste pipe as warm water into the stream. The stream steamed all winter and did no work at all.
8He wanted to know one thing. Was the waste the fault of the engine, or was it the law of fire? If a wiser man built a better engine, would all the heat come out as work? Or was there a wall somewhere that no builder could pass?
9Now a boy named Will Harle went down that pit at the age of eight. His father was a hewer, who cut the coal. His brother Ned was twelve and already earning. There were four smaller children at home, and the rent did not wait.
10Will's work was to be a trapper. Listen to what a trapper was. A pit breathes. Air goes down one shaft and is drawn through all the workings and up another, and it is steered through the tunnels by wooden doors. If a door stands open, the air goes the short way home, and the far workings fill with gas. So a child sat at each door, in the dark, with a string in his hand. When he heard the coal tubs coming he pulled the door open. When they had passed he let it fall shut. He did it for twelve hours, and he had no candle, for candles cost money, and a child needs no light to pull a string.
11Will sat in a hole cut in the wall beside his door. For the first week he wept, quietly, so the putters would not hear him. After that he learned the dark as a blind man learns a house. Most of all he knew the air, for the air was his trade. He knew its push against the door and the cold of it on his cheek.
12The gas the miners feared most they called firedamp. It came out of the coal itself with a small hiss, like a kettle before it sings. It had no colour and little smell. Mixed with air, it waited. Then it met a flame, and it was done waiting.
13And the men worked by flame. There was no other light under the earth. Each hewer had a candle stuck to the wall with a lump of clay. Where the gas was known to be bad, they used the steel mill instead. A boy turned a handle, and a wheel of steel spun against a flint and threw off a stream of sparks, and by that poor flicker men cut coal.
14Ned Harle turned a steel mill in the far workings, where his father hewed.
15Every soul in that village knew what could happen. In the spring of the year Will went down, it happened at the Felling pit, a few miles along the river. Ninety-two men and boys died there in one morning. Will's mother stood at her door and looked toward the smoke. Then she looked at her husband eating his bread. She said nothing, and he said nothing. The next morning he went down as before, with his two sons behind him.
16It came to Will's own pit in the autumn of the year after.
17He was at his door. He felt it before he heard it: the air stopped. In all his time underground the air had never once stopped. Then it came back the wrong way, hot, and with it something that was less a sound than a blow. The door that was his whole work was torn from its post and went past him like a leaf.
18He woke lying in the roadway with his mouth full of dust. It was no darker than before, for it had always been wholly dark. But it was silent. No tubs. No feet. Far off there was a roaring that came and went, as a fire sounds in a chimney.
19Then there were voices. Men were coming along the road from the inner workings, calling out names. There were six of them, and one had a broken arm. Their candles were out. One man struck a light, and an old hewer knocked it from his hand before it caught. "Would you finish what it started?" he said.
20They stood in the black and argued which way to go. The short way to the shaft was the way the blast had come. One said to go that way, and quickly, before the roof came down. But Will knew a thing the men did not stop to think of, because it was his trade and not theirs.
21After the fire comes the afterdamp. That is the dead air a fire leaves behind it, with the life burned out. It does not burn. It does not smell. A man walks into it and grows sleepy and sits down to rest. In a fired pit, more die of the afterdamp than of the flame.
22"Not that way," said Will. No one heard him, so he said it again and pulled at a coat. "The air is wrong that way. It is warm and it is not moving. There is live air still coming down the old road. I can feel it. It is cold on the wet side of my face."
23"The bairn sits at a door," said the old hewer, "and feels the air twelve hours a day. Which of us has done that? Lead on, lad."
24So a boy of nine led six men through the dark by the cold on his cheek. He wet his face with pit water, again and again, to feel it better. Twice the cold left him. Twice he stopped, and went back, and found it again in a side road he had never walked. They passed a trap door still shut, and its trapper still in his hole behind it, a boy Will knew, with the string in his hand. He seemed asleep. He would not wake. The old hewer carried him all the same.
25They came at last to the foot of the shaft where the air fell down cold and sweet as water. The men stood in it with their mouths open, like men drinking.
26Seven came up alive that way. Twenty-three did not come up. Will's father and his brother Ned were at the far face, where it began.
27Now hear what the engine-man did. When the pit fired, every man at the surface ran to the shaft. Matthew Reay did not run. He looked at his beam going up and coming down, and he stayed with it. For he knew his counts. If the fire went out under his boiler, the water would rise in the low workings a foot in the hour. Any man still living down there behind a fall of stone would drown in the dark while his rescuers were digging toward him.
28He fed the fire two days and two nights. On the second night the viewer came, who managed the pit for its owners. He said the coal itself was burning below, and the shafts must be sealed to smother it, and there was no one left alive to drown. Then Matthew sat down on his coal heap and put his black hands over his face. The beam went up and down a while longer by itself, on the heat that was left in the boiler. It went slower, and slower, and stopped.
29Will did not go below again that year. His mother would have sent him, for she had four small ones and no wage coming in. But Matthew Reay came to her door with his cap in his hand. He wanted a boy to carry coal to the boiler, he said, and he would pay a trapper's wage for it. "The lad has a feel for where the air goes," he said. "I want to see if he has a feel for where the heat goes."
30So Will learned the engine. He learned that all its strength lay between the hot place and the cold. One evening Matthew showed him the slate.
31"Thirty years," the old man said. "Here is the coal. Here is the water raised. Now, Will. A basket of coal has so much heat in it and no more. Where does the heat go?"
32"Into the lifting," said Will.
33"A little of it. Go and put your hand near the chimney. Go and put your hand in the stream."
34"It goes out," said Matthew. "It goes from the fire into everything that is colder than the fire. Into the iron, the brick, the water, the sky. It only ever goes the one way. In thirty years I have never once seen it come back. I catch a little of it as it goes by, the way a mill catches a river. The most of it gets past me."
35"Could you catch it all?"
36"That is my question." Matthew rubbed the slate with his thumb. "I am too old, and I have not the numbers. Somebody will have the numbers."
37In the third winter after the fire, the viewer came to the pit head with a small thing in his hand. It was an oil lamp. Round its flame stood a chimney of fine iron gauze, like a cage for a wasp. A chemist in London named Humphry Davy had made it. After Felling he had been begged for help, and he had gone down the pits himself and carried bottles of firedamp back to London. And he had found out a thing about flame. It will not pass through a fine mesh of metal. The metal steals its heat as it tries to pass, and a flame robbed of its heat is only air. So the gas could go in to the flame, and the flame could not come out to the gas.
38The men did not believe it. A flame was a flame. They had buried too many to trust a cage of wire.
39So the viewer said he would carry it himself into the foulest place in the pit, a blind heading that had been boarded off for a year. He asked for one man to come with him and mind the door. No man spoke. Will was twelve by then, and tall. "I'll mind the door," he said. "It is my trade."
40They went in. Will heard the hiss of the gas in the roof, the kettle that does not sing. The viewer lifted the lamp slowly up into it.
41The flame inside the gauze stretched tall and turned blue. Then the whole cage filled with blue fire, soft and trembling, burning the gas as fast as it came in. The gauze glowed a dull red. And outside the cage, where there lay gas enough to kill every man in the pit, there was nothing. The fire stayed in its house.
42Will looked at it a long time. He thought of Ned in the far workings, turning the mill of sparks. He did not say anything.
43Davy would take no payment for the lamp. He gave it to the pits for nothing. And in that same season an engine-man at Killingworth named George Stephenson made a safe lamp of his own by another road, and tried it in the gas with his own hand. So there were two. Will thought it a good thing that there were two.
44Yet be told the truth. The lamp did not end the dying. With a safe light in their hands, the owners sent men into deeper and fouler seams than they had dared before, and pits still fired, and children still sat at the doors for another thirty years. What the lamp gave was a chance. What men did with the chance was their own doing.
45Matthew Reay died in his bed, an old man. Will Harle kept the engine after him, and kept the slate, and never found the wall he was looking for. But he asked every engine-wright who came through whether anyone had. One of them told him that the French had lost their long war with England, and that a Frenchman was saying they had lost it to English coal and English engines.
46"Then there is a Frenchman asking my question," said Will. "Good. Let him ask it louder than I can."
47He was right. Across the water there was a young soldier who had the numbers. He would never hear of a pit boy on the Tyne. But the question had gone out of the black country like a coal carried in a horn, and it was already in his hand.