Formerly the shaft was supported by the rocks, but the water had succeeded in undermining them, sometimes by infiltration underneath them, sometimes by dislodging them from their places and making them lose their equilibrium; some of them projected through the walls of the shaft and their sides were black with moisture. Presently these undermined rocks would collapse, dragging down in their fall all the surrounding earth. What a disaster it would be. The miners would be buried alive like earth-worms. Only their feet would be visible, thought the old man, as had been the case with his mother. "Entombed by the will of God." It would be no use digging and trying to reach them; they would be too far down; the shaft was three hundred fathoms deep and the whole mine was dangerous. The walls of its galleries were as thin as those of a bee-hive. So much ore had been extracted from it that entire caves had been formed in the spongy earth. Whenever the shaft should collapse, the walls of the galleries would not hold out any more, the whole mine would fall in, and nothing would be left but an enormous cavity to show the curious sightseer. The old man regarded the prospect of such a collapse calmly, for to die in a mine seemed to him quite natural as he had been born there. He would have found it strange if his sad existence had ended on the surface of the ground; on the other hand a death down here seemed quite simple and natural. Here he felt at home. He remembered how when seized with illness on one occasion, before he had become old, he had not even ascended to the surface, but remained in the gallery where he worked all the time, his comrades bringing him food. He had often passed the night in his gallery stretched on comparatively soft ground. In old times he had been often seized with a desire to ascend, to see again the sun and the starry nights, but all that was now far away. Now he felt at home here in this darkness where it was so warm and so comfortable, that, but for the dampness, one would like to remain there always! The water kept on coming down in resonant cascades. But in spite of this, the old man distinctly heard not far off the blows of the miners' innumerable pickaxes, the dull echoes of explosions in distant galleries, and vague human noises. Here and there in the walls of the shaft one saw black holes, once the entrances to ancient galleries which had long ago been exhausted of their ore and abandoned.