Little by little Hal began to realise the full horror of a mine-disaster. It was not noise and smoke and darkness, nor frantic, wailing women; it was not anything above ground, but what was below in the smoking black pit! It was men! Men whom Hal knew, whom he had worked with and joked with, whose smiles he had shared; whose daily life he had come to know! Scores, possibly hundreds of them, they were down here under his feet--some dead, others injured, maimed. What would they do? What would those on the surface do for them? Hal tried to get to Cotton, to ask him questions; but the camp-marshal was surrounded, besieged. He was pushing the women back, exclaiming, “Go away! Go home!” What? Go home? they cried. When their men were in the mine? They crowded about him closer, imploring, shrieking. “Get out!” he kept exclaiming. “There’s nothing you can do! There’s nothing anybody can do yet! Go home! Go home!” He had to beat them back by force, to keep them from pushing one another into the pit-mouth. Everywhere Hal looked were women in attitudes of grief: standing rigid, staring ahead of them as if in a trance; sitting down, rocking to and fro; on their knees with faces uplifted in prayer; clutching their terrified children about their skirts. He saw an Austrian woman, a pitiful, pale young thing with a ragged grey shawl about her head, stretching out her hands and crying: “Mein Mann! Mein Mann!” Presently she covered her face, and her voice died into a wail of despair: “O, mein Mann! O, mein Mann!” She turned away, staggering about like some creature that has received a death wound. Hal’s eyes followed her; her cry, repeated over and over incessantly, became the leit-motif of this symphony of horror. He had read about mine-disasters in his morning newspaper; but here a mine-disaster became a thing of human flesh and blood. The unendurable part of it was the utter impotence of himself and of all the world. This impotence became clearer to him each moment--from the exclamations of Cotton and of the men he questioned. It was monstrous, incredible--but it was so! They must send for a new fan, they must wait for it to be brought in, they must set it up and get it into operation; they must wait for hours after that while smoke and gas were cleared out of the main passages of the mine; and until this had been done, there was nothing they could do--absolutely nothing! The men inside the mine would stay. Those who had not been killed outright would make their way into the remoter chambers, and barricade themselves against the deadly “after damp.” They would wait, without food or water, with air of doubtful quality--they would wait and wait, until the rescue-crew could get to them! SECTION 26.