QUICKSANDS ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.

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547

free and in full health, which draws you by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, drags you a little deeper, which appears to punish you for your resistance by a redoubling of its grasp, which sinks the man slowly into the earth while it leaves him all the time to look at the horizon, the trees, the green fields, the smoke of the villages in the plain, the sails of the ships upon the sea, the birds flying and singing, the sunshine, the sky. Enlize ment is the grave become a tide and rising from the depths of the earth towards a living man. Each minute is an inexorable enshroudress. The victim attempts to sit down, to lie down, to creep; every movement he makes inters him; he straightens up, he sinks in; he feels that he is being swallowed up; he howls, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, despairs. Behold him waist deep in the sand; the sand reaches his breast; he is now only a bust. He raises his arms, utters furious groans, clutches the beach with his nails, would hold by that straw, leans upon his elbows to pull himself out of this

The sand reaches

soft sheath, sobs frenziedly; the sand rises. his shoulders, the sand reaches his neck; the face alone is visible now. The mouth cries, the sand fills it; silence. The eyes still gaze, the sand shuts them; night. Then the forehead decreases, a little hair flutters above the sand; a hand protrudes, comes through the surface of the beach, moves and shakes, and disappears. Sinister effacement of a man.

"This fatal mishap, always possible upon one or another coast of the sea, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewer of Paris.

"The water filtered into certain underlying, particularly friable soils; the floor, which was of paving-stones, as in the old sewers, or of hydraulic cement upon concrete, as in the new galleries, having lost its support, bent. A bend in a floor of that kind is a crack, is a crumbling. The floor gave way over a certain space. This crevasse, a hiatus in a gulf of mud, was called technically fontis. What is a fontis? It is the quicksand of the sea-shore suddenly encountered under ground; it is the beach of Mont St. Michel in a sewer. The

548

QUICKSAND IN THE SEWER.

diluted soil is, as it were, in fusion; all its molecules are in suspension in a soft medium; it is not land, and it is not water. Depth sometimes very great. Nothing more fearful than such a mischance. If the water predominates, death is prompt, there is swallowing up; if the earth predominates, death is slow, there is enlizement.

"Can you picture to yourself such a death? If enlizement is terrible on the shore of the sea, what is it in the cloaca ? Instead of the open air, the full light, the broad day, that clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life, those barks seen in the distance, that hope under every form, probable passers, succor possible until the last moment; instead of all that, deafness, blindness, a black arch, an interior of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire under a cover! the slow stifling by the filth, a stone box in which asphyxia opens its claw in the slime and takes you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death rattle; mire instead of sand, sulphu retted hydrogen instead of the hurricane, ordure instead of the ocean; and to call, and to gnash your teeth, and writhe, and struggle, and agonize, with that huge city above your head knowing nothing of it all!

"The depth of the fontis varied, as well as its length, and its density by reason of the more or less yielding character of the subsoil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes no bottom could be found. The mire was here almost solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Phélippeaux slough. The mire bears more or less according to its greater or less density. A child escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to divest yourself of every kind of burden. To throw away his bag of tools, or his basket, or his hod, is the first thing that every sewer-man does when he feels the soil giving way beneath him.

"Jean Valjean found himself in presence of a fontis. A yielding of the pavement, imperfectly upheld by the underlying sand, had occasioned a damming of the rain-water. In

PERIL OF JEAN VALJEAN.

549

filtration having taken place, sinking had followed. The floor, broken up, had disappeared in the mire. For what distance? Impossible to say. The obscurity was deeper than anywhere else. It was a mud-hole in the cavern of night.

"Jean Valjean felt the pavement slipping away under him. He entered into this slime. It was water on the surface, mire at the bottom. He must surely pass through. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was expiring, and Jean Valjean exhausted. Where else could he go? Jean Valjean advanced. Moreover, the quagmire appeared not very deep for a few steps. But in proportion as he advanced, his feet sank in. He very soon had the mire half-knee deep, and water above his knees. He walked on, holding Marius with both arms as high above the water as he could. The mud now came up to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer turn back. He sank in deeper and deeper. This mire, dense enough for one man's weight, evidently could not bear two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have had a chance of escape separately. Jean Valjean continued to advance, supporting this dying man, who was perhaps a corpse.

"The water came up to his armpits; he felt that he was foundering; it was with difficulty that he could move in the depth of mire in which he was. The density, which was the support, was also the obstacle. He still held Marius up, and with an unparalleled outlay of strength he advanced; but he sank deeper. He now had only his head out of the water, and his arms supporting Marius. There is in the old pictures. of the deluge a mother doing thus with her child.

"He sank still deeper, he threw his face back to escape the water, and to be able to breathe; he who should have seen him in this obscurity would have thought he saw a mask floating upon the darkness; he dimly perceived Marius's drooping head and livid face above him; he made a desperate effort, and thrust his foot forward; his foot struck something solid: a support. It was time.

"He rose, and writhed, and rooted himself upon this support

with a sort of fury. It produced the effect upon him of the first step of a staircase reascending towards life.

"This support, discovered in the mire at the last moment, was the beginning of the other slope of the floor, which had bent without breaking, and had curved beneath the water like a board, and in a single piece. A well-constructed paving forms an arch, and has this firmness. This fragment of the floor, partly submerged, but solid, was a real slope, and, once upon this slope, they were saved. Jean Valjean ascended this inclined plane, and reached the other side of the quagmire.

"On coming out of the water, he struck against a stone, and fell upon his knees. This seemed to him fitting, and he remained thus for some time, his soul lost in unspoken prayer to God.

"He rose, shivering, chilled, infected, bending beneath this dying man, whom he was dragging on, all dripping with slime, his soul filled with a strange light."

MERCURY.

PROPERTIES AND PECULIARITIES OF MERCURY, OR QUICKSILVER. AMALGAMATION. CINNABAR. WHERE IT IS FOUND. — ALMADEN AND OTHER MINES. — CURIOUS CUSTOMS AT IDRIA. - MODES OF WORKING. — HUANCA VELICA. QUICKSILVER MINES IN CALIFORNIA. CALIFORNIA LAWSUITS.—WONDERFUL PROPERTIES OF SPANISH TITLES. AN UNHAPPY ACCIDENT. — PRACTICAL VALUE OF AN EARTHQUAKE — AN UNDERGROUND CHAPEL.

ONE of the most valuable mineral substances is the one. which is known as Mercury, or Quicksilver. 'It has many properties peculiar to no other metal. At an ordinary temperature it is a fluid. At thirty-nine or forty degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) it becomes solid, and resembles lead. At six hundred and sixty-two degrees (Fahrenheit) it boils, and is thrown out on an invisible, transparent vapor, like steam. Before it reaches the boiling point, if it is exposed to the air at a high temperature, it absorbs oxygen, and is converted into red oxide. Strong nitric acid will absorb mercury. Acids affect it somewhat, but not to any great extent. It mixes with lead, zinc, gold, and silver, and it may be separated from them by a chemical process, and be made perfectly pure. Sometimes the cheap metals are used to adulterate mercury; but the effect of this mixture is to produce an amalgam, whose adulterations can be easily detected. It is found sometimes in a native or pure form, and sometimes amalgamated with silver; but these instances are so rare that deposits of this sort cannot be relied upon as sources of supply.

Sometimes mercury is found in its natural state in cavities in the earth, so that it may be dug up in considerable quantities. The chief source of supply, however, is in the form of