Three men attended to each machine, and by means of levers and wheels the height of a drill could be adjusted to a nicety. Movement was difficult, for the space was cramped. In the murky gloom the outlines of the men could be faintly discerned. The fitful glimmer of the oil-lamp which each carried--electric lighting had still to be invented--fell upon their semi-nude bodies and swarthy faces. The streaming perspiration mingling with the grime and dust, which strayed over their skin in fantastic streaks, gave the men a fiendish appearance. The temperature was that of an oven. As the men drew nearer and nearer to the heart of old Gotthard, the heat rose until the men laboured in an atmosphere of 90° or more. The only sounds were those of the hammering of the drills as they bored into the rock, and the hissing of the escaping air after it had completed its allotted task in operating the chisels. At long intervals there came a heavy silence. The holes had been bored to the requisite depth. The machine was drawn far back into the boring. Explosives were slipped into the holes and tamped home. From a safe distance the charges were fired. A dull, smothered roar, a rending and crumbling, and another gap was torn in the bowels of this monarch of the Alps. The excavators hurried forward, cleared away the tumbled debris, and brought the lumbering drill carriage up to the fresh working surface. Day in and day out, week after week, month by month, this round continued. It was monotonous, and the work was hard. The stifling atmosphere and the conditions told severely on the physique of the workmen. Congestion of the brain, irregular action of the heart, anæmia, or one of numerous other obscure maladies, was the reward for their labour. Their faces assumed a deathly pallor; working in cramped positions gave them an unsightly stoop, and deprived their legs of movement, so they tottered rather than walked as they returned from the scene of their toil at the end of the shift. The pay was wretched, ranging from half-a-crown to five shillings (from 60 to 125 cents) per day of eight hours, out of which they had to board themselves! Needless to say, but few Englishmen or western Europeans figured on the pay-roll, for none would accept such starvation pay for such terrible work. The labourers were Italians for the most part, and yet nearly one and all, by subsisting on miserable food, consisting for the most part of a kind of meal porridge, cheap and yet limited in quantity, saved a part of their earnings and sent it home to their needy families in sunny Italy. The average number of men employed was about 4000, half at either end, but at times it ran up to as high as 7000. The mountain claimed 310 lives, killed by accident alone, and 877 injured, before it was conquered; but, considering the conditions, it is remarkable that the casualty roll was not heavier.