CRY OF WARNING
Francisco Rojas Gonzalez
THE
PIT WAS
deep and dark. Like a gigantic mouth open–
ing in a black, eternal yawn, throwing up against the blue sky
its foul breath, it waited lazily, sucking in the human hive that
milled about its edges every morning.
Down the cold damp throat leading perpendicularly into
the belly of the mine, there ran a slender thread of a ladder by
which the men descended, on their way to drill in the hard rock,
to follow with the anxiety of moles the load of gold in the
stratum of a curiously wandering earth formation.
In the spring time, when the fat face of the globe is not
big enough for our comrade sun to drench with its Marxian
gift of light, it creates for the men in the depths another of its
miracles: a sheaf of rays that glances off the muddy walls of the
gigantic throat to pierce that chaos in which the miners hide the
delights of their poverty. Then the workers throw down their
picks and their drills to look up, high up, three hundred meters,
and see the disk of the sun that winks at them; but it is so far
away that some take it playfully for a gold piece.
Then they go on with their task. They draw together in a
bunch until they form a palpitating mass, working, working like
a nest of worms boring into a corpse.
The following dialogue comes out in spurts, impelled by the
uneven jumping of two pairs of lungs swollen with silicosis-or,
in simpler terms, by the digging of other miners-those un–
tiring miners discovered by the exact eye of Dr. Koch.
"They claim the lode runs along here...."
"The lode
I ...
Pull back your lantern, will you, I'm suf-
focating with heat.... Heat and sweat.... Say, listen, man,
did you ever think about a river of sweat? What a river they
could make out of workers' sweat, eh ?"
And the rhythm of their digging, syncopated by the blow of
steel on rock, is caught up by an echo and thrown
furious~
against the stony wall.
At last-an "at last" a long time off-eight hours-the
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