tunnel. I recalled with poignant regret that Jack Winston and I had
once made hay of his room; but evidently he bore no malice, for after
saying that he was not surprised to see me, as everybody came this way
sooner or later, he offered to show me his tunnel, of which this was
the Italian mouth. It had another at Brig, twelve miles away, and
boasted the longest throat in the world, but as it was marvellously
ventilated, it would never choke in its own smoke, and Bolzano was
very proud of the engineering achievement. Having discharged my
carriage, I went with him into a workshop, heard the humming of
dynamos, and the buzzing of tremendous turbines, actuated by the fall
of the river Diveria, and gazed with the fascination of a mouse for a
cat at a huge and diabolical fan, driving air into the tunnel. This
fearful beast had a house to itself, with a passage down which you
could venture like Theseus entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur; but
such was the volume of breath which it drew into its mighty lungs that
you must use all your strength not to be sucked in and hurled against
the shafting; all your self-control not to be confused by its loud,
unceasing roar.

Hardly had we come out from this weird place, which would have given
Edgar Allan Poe an inspiration for a creepy tale, when Bolzano showed
me a relief gang of men getting ready to enter the tunnel, in a train
consisting of wooden boxes drawn by a miniature locomotive. This was
my chance. I was hurried off to his quarters, helped into rough,
miner's clothing, with great boots up to my knees, and given a miner's
lamp. Then, joining the eight hundred Italians,--a battalion of the
soldiers of Labour,--we got into a box, and set off to relieve eight
hundred other such soldiers who for eight hours had toiled in the
schisty heart of the mountain.