But still fall after fall on the further side delayed their progress, and the work of repairing the blown-out stoppings by such wood brattice as could be got at, was long and tedious. The rescuers toiled and sweated, pausing every now and then to draw upon the food and drink sent up from behind; and the hours flew unheeded. At last, upon the further side of one of the worst of these falls--a loose mingled mass of rock and coal--they came on indications that showed them they had reached the centre and heart of the disaster. A door leading on the right to one of the side-roads of the pit known as Holford's Heading was blown outwards, and some trucks from the heading had been dashed across the main intake, and piled up in a huddled and broken mass against the farther wall. Just inside that door lay victim after victim, mostly on their faces, poor fellows! as they had come running out from their stalls at the noise of the explosion, only to meet the fiery blast that killed them. Two or three had been flung violently against the sides of the heading, and were left torn, with still bleeding wounds, as well as charred and blackened by the flame. Of sixteen men and boys that lay in this place of death, not one had survived to hear the stifled words--half groans, half sobs, of the comrades who had found them. "But, thank God! no torture, no _thought_," said George to himself as he went from face to face; "an instant--a flash--then nothingness." Many of the men were well known to him. He had seen them last hanging about the village street, pale with famine--the hatred in their eyes pursuing him. He knelt down an instant beside an elderly man whom he could remember since he was quite a boy--a weak-eyed, sallow fellow, much given to preaching--much given, too, it was said, to beating his wife and children, as the waves of excitement took him. Anyway, a fellow who could feel, whose nerves stung and tormented him, even in the courses of ordinary life. He lay with his eyes half open, the face terribly scorched, the hands clenched, as though he still fought with the death that had overcome him. George covered the man's face with a handkerchief as the doctor left the body. "_He_ suffered," he said, under his breath. The doctor heard him, and nodded sadly. Hark! What was that? A cry--a faint cry! "They're some of them alive in the end workings," cried Madan, with a sob of joy. "Come on, my lads! come on!" And the party--all but Mr. Dixon--leaving the dead, pushed on through the foul atmosphere, over heaps of fallen stone and coal, in quest of the living. "Leave me a man," said Mr. Dixon, detaining the manager a moment. "I stay here. You have enough with you. If I judge right, it all began here." A collier stayed with him, unwillingly, panting all the time under the emotion of the rescue the man imagined but was not to see.