The entrance to the mines is almost a mile from the Immari office — inside a warehouse along the harbor next to the Rock. Two warehouses to be exact, joined on the interior with two separate facades to make them look like two warehouses from the street. A warehouse this large would stick out and inspire curiosity. Two common-sized warehouse fronts, however, could easily go unnoticed.
Inside the oversized warehouse, four lighter skinned black men are waiting for us. Moroccans would be my guess. Upon seeing us, the four men silently set about removing a tarp from a structure in the middle of the warehouse. When it’s revealed, I realize it’s not a structure at all — it’s the opening to the mine. A giant mouth spreading out at each side. I had expected a vertical shaft, but that’s the least of the surprises to come.
There’s a car, an electric one. And two large rails leading down into the mine. Clearly they’re moving a lot of dirt out.
Craig points to an empty rail car and then toward the harbor and the sea beyond the warehouse door. “We dig by day and load out by night, Mr. Pierce.”
“You dump the dirt—”
“In the bay if we can. If the moon is full, we sail farther out.” Craig says.
It makes sense. It’s about their only option to get rid of so much dirt.
I walk closer and inspect the mine shaft. It’s supported by large timbers, just like our mines in West Virginia, but there’s a thick black cord running from timber to timber, stretching as far as I can see. There are two cords actually, one on each side of the mine shaft. At the far side of the opening to the mine, the left cord attaches to… A telephone. The right-side cord simply runs into a box attached to a post. It has a metal lever, like a switch box. Power? Surely not.
When the Moroccans throw the last of the tarps aside, Rutger strides over and chastises the men in German. I understand a bit, one word in particular: “feuer.” Fire. My skin crawls at the sound of it. He points at the car, then the rails. The men look confused. This is no doubt for my benefit, and I turn away, refusing to watch the show and their humiliation. I hear Rutger retrieving something, and there’s clanging on the rails. I turn to see him lighting a wick inside a round paper bag atop a mini railcar, no bigger than a plate. Rutger attaches it to a single rail, and several of the Moroccans help him with a slingshot device that sends the plate and flame whizzing into the dark mine. The paper protects the flame from instantly blowing out.
A minute later we hear the distant poof of an explosion. Firedamp. Probably a methane pocket. Rutger motions for the Moroccans to send another volley, and they rush to the rail with another plate-car carrying a paper bag full of flame. I’m impressed. In West Virginia, I’m sorry to say, we use donkeys. On a good day, you strap the flame to the donkey’s back, slap him on the ass, and find him at the end of the mine — alive and wandering in the dark. On bad days you smell the barbecued flesh as you enter the mine, a sick smell of hair and organs fried with muscle and fat. I could never bring myself to eat the animal once we reached it, but I was almost alone in that. The mines are deep and the wages are paltry. Good meat is hard to come by. Every now and then a donkey would charge out alive and on fire, like some bad omen from a Biblical tale. But that was rare; hitting a methane pocket is like finding a live grenade — the explosion is instant and total. If the flame doesn’t kill you, the cave-in will.
This is a dangerous mine.
We hear the poof of the second volley, deeper this time.
The Moroccans load and launch a third trial.
We wait a bit, and when no sound comes, Rutger throws the switch on the box and gets behind the wheel of the car. Craig slaps me on the back. “We’re ready, Mr. Pierce.” Craig takes the passenger seat, and I sit on the bench in the back. Rutger cranks the car and drives recklessly into the mine, almost crashing into the rails at the entrance but swerving at the last minute to straddle them and then straighten the car as we plow deeper into the earth like characters out of some Jules Verne novel, maybe Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The tunnel is completely dark except for the car’s dim headlamps, which barely illuminate the area ten feet ahead of us. We drive at high speed for what seems like an hour, and I’m speechless, not that I could say a word over the racket of the truck in the tunnel. The scale is staggering, unimaginable. The tunnels are wide and tall, and much to my chagrin, very, very well made — not treasure-hunting tunnels; these are subterranean roads made to last.
The first few minutes into the mine is a constant turn. We must be following a spiral tunnel, like a corkscrew boring deep into the earth, deep enough to get under the bay.
The spiral deposits us into a larger staging area, no doubt used to sort and store supplies. I barely get a glimpse of crates and boxes before Rutger floors the car again, roaring down the straight tunnel with even more speed. We’re on a constant decline, and I can almost feel the air growing more damp with each passing second. There are several forks in the tunnel, but nothing slows Rutger down. He drives madly, swerving left and right, barely making the turns. I grip the seat. Craig leans over and touches the youth’s arm, but I can’t hear his voice over the deafening racket of the car’s engine. Whatever is said, Rutger doesn’t care for it. He brushes Craig’s arm off and bears down harder than ever. The engine screams and the tunnel zooms by in flashes.
Rutger’s putting on this little thrill ride to prove he knows the tunnels in the dark, that this is his territory, that he has my life in his hands. He wants to intimidate me. It’s working.
This mine is the biggest I’ve ever been in. And there are some giant mines in the mountains of West Virginia.
Finally, the tunnel opens onto a large, roughly shaped area — like a place where the miners had searched for direction and made several false starts. Electric lights hang from the ceiling, illuminating the space, revealing pockmarks and drill holes along the walls where blasts had started new tunnels, but were abandoned. I see a stack of the other black cord, laying in a bundle next to a table that holds another phone, no doubt connected to the surface.
The rail lines end here as well. The three mini rail cars sit in a row at the line’s termination point near the end of the room. The top part of two of them have been blown away, no doubt as they hit methane pockets along the way. The third sits quietly at the front of the other two; its flame jumps wildly as it claws for drifting pockets of oxygen in the dank space.
Rutger kills the engine, hops out, and blows out the candle.