Broken Hill is a nondescript town in the far west of New South Wales that lies over a thousand kilometres from Sydney, so distant from the state capital that it prefers to keep South Australian time. The typical postcard view of the city is an aerial one taken from a Flying Doctor plane, where it looks like a tiny circuit board stranded in an almost flat straggly-brown expanse of outback stretching to the horizon; only when the plane begins to descend towards the small local airport do you start to see furrows and ridges, skeletal trees, the bleach of salt lakes and claypans, the odd startled emu. In this vast dry bed west of the Darling River there are only one or two signs of human habitation, the corrugated iron roof of a farm or an out-station: Broken Hill lies out there in the big red, and hugs its isolation. The town lacks the conventional markers of the picturesque but its history and character are exemplary in a country that prides itself on the adaptability of its people.
I was a Medical Officer at Broken Hill Base Hospital for a year between 1990 and 1991, which meant being a kind of dogsbody; but there were few areas of medicine I didn’t touch on in that year. I learned to treat problems of a variety and type I’d never met in textbooks. It was the kind of experience that left my heart in my mouth at times, other people’s hearts often being in my hands, but relief at getting things right buoyed me through fatigue and worry. For several months I was duty officer in casualty by day, and up at night to learn from the midwives, and sometimes there were entire fortnights when I never got an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Lack of staff forced those of us who were there to work long hours, which was irksome since I seldom had time to observe the country around me as much as I would have liked.
But I did notice a few things.
There were, all told, four directions to go from Broken Hill. Bush, which was anywhere in the four-wheeled zones that lay due north, west, and east; downriver, sheer poetic licence since the Darling river from which the town derived its drinking water ran at its closest point nearly a hundred kilometres to the east; and t’Adelaide, where the Flying Doctors would take you to the General Hospital for surgical repair if you sliced your tendons—those were the original three. Then there was the pervasive Broken Hill byname: You from Away?
Away was indeed my provenance. Away started a few hundred kilometres from Broken Hill, at Cobar on the Sydney road, hovered around the affluent Murray and Darling rivers on the Victoria border, extended a little into neighbouring South Australia, and meandered on rugged, men-only holidays fishing for the freshwater crustaceans called yabbies up along the dingo fence in Cooper’s Creek, abutting Queensland. One of the world’s most remote river systems, this collection of transient waterholes with its shelter of coolibah trees and lush vegetation had rescued the explorer Sturt from the relentless heat in 1845, on one of his attempts to find Australia’s inland sea.
There was, of course, another—unstated—way to go. That was underground. It came too as a permanent option for some of the older miners, since gravity is a force so strong it eventually drags all living things under the earth’s cuticle. ‘In nations as in geology,’ wrote the French historian Jules Michelet, ‘warmth is down below. Descend, and you will find that it increases; in the lower levels, it is burning hot.’
I went underground once, just for a day, in the South Mines, down to level twenty-five. Level twenty-five was a kilometre under the surface of the earth. It was black, damp and very warm. ‘I was obliged to do it’, wrote the German writer Heinrich von Kleist in 1801 about going down the mines at Freiberg in Saxony, in what had become a rite of passage for German writers in the Romantic era, ‘so that when I’m asked “have you been there?” I can answer: yes.’ Like Kleist, I wanted to say ‘yes’, so I clad myself in gumboots to protect my feet and a hard-hat to take any knocks. A few weeks before, I’d read Fanny Kemble’s diary entry on her visit to the excavations for the Thames Tunnel in 1827: she was nearly overcome by an ‘indescribable feeling of subterranean vastness’. She, however, was about to enter the age of the technological sublime; here in the mechanised gloom, it was decidedly post-heroic.
What I could see was a smooth functioning warren of cables and sewers and service tunnels. Giant mastodons came up the ramp from below, their lights flaring. Most of the miners’ work had been automated and seemed to be entirely given over to running and monitoring machines, rather than coming muscle to stone with the rockface. You would have to go back and read Orwell on the ‘fillers’, in 1937, to get an impression of the sheer physical dint involved in cutting out a mountain from the inside. The miners he describes had to crouch down on their knees and shovel for seven and half hours, with one short break for bread and dripping and a flask of cold tea. He talks about the oppressive heat too, and the fierce blasts of air let out by opening the fire doors, and the distances the men had to trudge underground. That was mining at the end of the second technological revolution, when humans still manipulated matter with their bare hands. Mining, like farming and building, is one of those forms of work in which the worker is himself significantly altered by what he does; his posture, gait and build are never the same again after he has ‘worked’ on the world.
But the machines weren’t always predictable, nor was the seam. I’d had calls in the early morning at the hospital, when the emergency room waited for a crushed miner to be driven up from the several levels beneath ground; and there was the occasion when I’d had to wait at the mine-shaft for a thirty-year old to be winched up from the passage where he’d collapsed. He was blue where his skin could be seen through a film of dust, his eyes fixed and dilated and there was nothing I could do. His heart, that fish on a lead, had stopped jumping a good twenty minutes before.
The pensioners, the ones who stayed in the town when their money came through, and they weren’t many, would talk about how things had been in the old days. Life had been pretty awful.
In the mid-1880s a boundary rider called Charles Rasp discovered the tip of a hangar of ore in the Barrier Range that would prove to be the world’s largest seam of silver, lead and zinc: a few years later over nine thousand men working in ten mines were supplying ten percent of the world’s lead and eight percent of its silver. The orebody was shaped like a coat-hanger, its neck the outcrop of ‘broken hill’ from which the town got its name. Rasp and the other outriders who became his partners lacked the expertise to make much of the discovery and the rights were sold to a group of pastoralists who founded the Broken Hill Proprietary Company. Edward Stokes, the town’s gazetteer in his photographic record of the town in its hardest years, United We Stand, put the company’s wealth at a conservative eight million pounds by the end of the decade. BHP’s dividends established heavy industry in the country and were one of the major factors in making Australia the country with the highest living standard in the world in 1900: many Australians are unaware of this fact and those who are recall it with irony. And BHP is the country’s one truly international company, though the name of the town is a ghost inside the acronym. But clearly minerals and fossil fuels were instrumental in transforming what were toe-hold colonies into modern nation-continents, and in this the opening of the Australian interior has much in common with the settlement of the American West.
The whole history of Broken Hill was one-way: lots of money out, and precious little in. Few of the mine proprietors had their residences built in the town. W. H. Patton, the BHP manager in 1899, refused to open the new hospital; it was characteristic of his disdain for this inhospitable place and the miners who worked the seam. After the 1909 lockout, BHP was regarded with sarcasm and bitter contempt in the town that had made it wealthy.
And the region was inhospitable. In summer the temperature was a constant 100 Fahrenheit and above. Rain was scanty; the nearest river a couple of days away. There was the torment of the bushfly, musca vetustissima: its passion for bodily orifices had been noted centuries before by William Dampier, one of the first Europeans to stumble across the continent. Everything had to be shipped up the road from Adelaide, over three hundred miles. In winter and spring the prevailing westerlies blew unimpeded across the scrub, which had been laid waste by almost complete deforestation and overgrazing, and whipped up huge billowing sandstorms that could be seen in their ominous approach an hour before they hit the town. The mobile rampart of sand blocked out the sun and choked the lungs, driving flocks of panicky birds any which way in the preternatural stillness that rides ahead of pandemonium. A storm mighty as a deity heaved great eddies of dust from the slags of lead and zinc tailings next to the mineshafts, and made men and women tremble for their lives. The earth was in the sky. Movables were battened down, the animals taken in, the windows sealed. And still the dust crept into the houses—through the ventilation slats, through minute cracks in the walls—and left a thick toxic rime on the tables and chairs.
I experienced a pipsqueak descendant of one of these sandstorms myself one cold July morning shortly after arriving: it was a nagging, tugging wind that barely lasted an hour and though it threatened at times to rip off the roof it was certainly nothing like as fearsome as the rolling dust storms that had entered collective memory, most famously in 1907 when the town’s first professional photographer, within weeks of arriving, caught his first scoop: a menacing black nimbus of dirt rising up behind the Trades Hall. Nonetheless, this hour-long storm was rude enough to expose our house as the flimsy tin-walled construction it was; it brought to mind Lillian Gish struggling against the eight aeroplane propellers used to drum up the north wind in the famous pre-talkie film The Wind, in which she and her lover are a hopelessly fragile pair in the lulling core of the maelstrom. The visual power of the film, it was apparent to me when I saw it once on television, would have been swamped by sound-effects.
A different dust killed miners. The old train station in Sulphide Street had been converted into a museum and one room filled with old technology from the hospital. Iron lungs were displayed in every corner. These were required for the miners who developed pneumoconiosis and progressive fibrosis of the lungs because of the dry drilling. Safety measures were non-existent. Kerosene lamps lit the shaft landing areas but candles were the main source of illumination until about 1911, when carbide lamps were introduced. It is easy to imagine how intimately a miner would have to know his orebody, replacing sight with a keen sense of touch and vibration. ‘You’d tap her, try the ground’, confirms one old miner in Stokes’ book, categorising anything in nature that was fickle or difficult to handle as female—I remember one of my patients, who’d taken off his index finger while doing some repair work on his fence, sexing the culprit chain-saw even as he gingerly unwound the improvised bandage from his mangled hand—‘and the ground was groanin’ and talkin’’. Other fatalities were due to the regular cave-ins (blasts and mine fires were less common since, unlike coal deposits, the lode did not produce explosive gases); men ended up crushed beneath huge boulders and slabs of rock. Between 1906 and 1913 one hundred and forty-five men died in the mines. Without running water or sewerage, the families suffered too: typhoid epidemics regularly claimed scores of infant lives.
The population then stood at thirty thousand. Broken Hill became, through want of an alternative arrangement, a self-governing municipality. On paper it was part of New South Wales, but the State Government had little interest in such a remote outpost and the town made its own disdain of Sydney ostentatiously clear. The mayor Jabez Wright refused to attend the celebration of the federation of states into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. ‘I have something more important to do than attend the National Drunk’, read the message he sent by telegram. The resentment was long-standing: the state government had refused to build a railway to connect Broken Hill with the South Australian narrow-gauge system that ran to the border, scarcely thirty miles away; and it was only when a consortium called The Silverton Tramway Company built a connecting line in 1888 that the city was released from its isolation. By the turn of the century Broken Hill was a small town that had organised itself well beyond the cargo stage of human settlement described in Gabriel Márquez’s Leaf Storm: ‘Even the dregs of the cities’ sad love come to us in the whirlwind and built small wooden houses where at first a corner and half-cot were a dismal home for the night, and then a noisy clandestine street, and then a whole inner village of tolerance within the town.’
Two newspapers were established, one of which—The Barrier Daily Truth—is still publishing. Houses with their corrugated tin roofs and thin walls were built along parched green avenues and gum trees. The town took on a grid form, and the streets were named after the chemicals associated with mining and extraction: Bromide (our street), Blende, Argent, Cobalt, Oxide, Chloride. The poet Auden, who prided himself on his knowledge of mining lore and mentioned Broken Hill in one of his early dramatic pieces of the 1930s, would have been delighted by the nomenclature. A brewery was set up; there was a Theatre Royal, a score of hotels, any number of watering holes, a brass band… it was the beginning of a hundred years of going it alone.
The inner village of tolerance, as far as it went, stopped at the city limits where the desert started. Beyond was the Commonwealth of Australia: the Municipality of the Hill stood with its crisscrossing streets and patches of sunlight and refused to look any farther than the rows of quondong trees and municipal parks planted in the south to act as a windbreak against the duststorms.
The difference between the Australia littoral—one of the most densely populated areas on Earth—and the interior, the bush, was so striking that I registered the difference and some of the resentments that exist between city and bush within a first few days of arriving in the country. There were people I met in Melbourne who’d never heard of, or didn’t seem to want to hear about, Broken Hill: for many Australians, their continent still has a ‘dead heart’. Some people in the Hill wouldn’t give a Sydneysider the time of day. After a while, I started calling where we lived Quarantina; I speculated what a continental people like the French or Russians might have made of the Australian scrub if they had been its exploiters rather than the British. They might have called it Erytheia, land of red dirt. The inertia induced by a landscape that stretches on and on into the remote distance is surely a species of Oblomovshchina—a word derived from the name of the lethargic main character in the famous novel by Goncharov. And the French dream of a glittering and bounteous Lake Chad in the middle of the Sahara that would feed the greedy boilers of the locomotives of the Trans-Saharan Railway bears ready comparison with the desperate search for Australia’s inland sea. But would the Russians or French have reacted differently to the mining towns? I doubt it: it seems a safe generalisation that ours is a civilisation that doesn’t want to know to whom it owes its graceful lifestyle. Who needs the red centre except for its minerals, a townie might shrug his shoulders; leave it to the reprobates, solitaries and misfits, so we can get on with the business of being liberal. At any account, it seemed as if contemporary Australians were still a long way from the feeling caught in its fright by C. E. W. Bean: ‘The Australian comes in the end to the mysterious half-desert country […] And the life of this mysterious country will affect the Australian imagination much as the life of the sea has affected the English.’
In the year of 1908–9 wages were docked to below the subsistence level. The company’s response to a court order requiring it to pay a minimum wage was to shut down production for two years. The town became a police state during the First World War, when the miners refused the draft. At the end of the war, they went on strike for nineteen months. The concluding chapter of United We Stand tells the remarkable story of that period of resistance and final triumph. The hospital became a relief station. Women miscarried; children developed malnutrition and child mortality increased by fifty percent; rent ceased to be paid, and people lived on a diet of bread, margarine, onions and potatoes. Every day the band went out and marched down Argent Street with most of the townsfolk behind the Union’s banner. Troops lined the streets, and there were running battles.
In the end the radical miners who had organised the Big Strike won, because no one else was prepared to do the work. The gum trees shed their bark along the Adelaide road and Bartley’s Barrier Band polished their instruments and went out in the heat and blood got shed on the streets as well as underground; but the message had reached home. It was just as Kafka, writer and insurance claims evaluator, formulated it in his report ‘Commune of Workers without Private Property’ (1918)—‘the working life as a matter of conscience and a matter of faith in one’s fellow man’. No activity involving human lives is ever entirely undeserving of attention, even if Kafka’s phrase represents the kind of seriousness that comes late to human structures. In one of Chekhov’s stories an idealistic young man decides not to work in a government office, but instead to seek honour in manual labour. He gets a job tiling roofs and painting houses: ‘I was living now among people to whom labour was obligatory [...] and who worked like carthorses, often with no idea of the moral significance of labour, and indeed, never using the word “labour” in conversation at all.’ He has taken on in an almost frivolous mood of acceptance what those who work all their lives shoulder involuntarily.
When the miners won, what they obtained were the most advanced working conditions anywhere in the industrial world. The working week was restricted to thirty-five hours. Giant ducts and air filters were built to extract the dust that killed so slowly and invidiously. The night shift was curtailed, since this was when most of the accidents happened. Explosives were fired at the end of each shift, and the men would wait for an hour until the debris had settled.
This created a closed shop well before the letter in Broken Hill. The Barrier Industrial Council—the Union’s new name—became the de facto government of the town. It hired and blackballed men, set prices in the shops, published a newspaper, regulated gambling hours and determined when the bottle shops could open. Since none of the tycoons who had made a bonanza out of the town ever built a mansion in it, the ‘Second Empire’ building of the Trades Hall with its mansards and metal roof and stately palm-trees became the one building in the town that suggested wealth or permanence. The ‘living wage’ would be negotiated here every three years by the union delegates and the companies. That was the only item on the agenda subject to negotiation: the health and safety measures of 1920 were to stay, almost as the town’s charter, and the Miners’ Pneumoconiosis Society in Oxide Street preserves the statistics showing the dramatic fall in mortality among their members after the dust was properly evacuated.
All of which meant that Broken Hill was a relic in contemporary Australia: a shrine to mateship and restrictive work practices. Jobs were scarce when I was there, a slide which had started in the early eighties and showed no signs of slackening off. The hospital was the second biggest employer in the town, and the month after I left they made forty nurses redundant. The Industrial Council used to pay inducements to doctors to come to the Hill; all that had gone well before my time. About five thousand people were variously out of work or retrenched or on slack time. There was a lot of illness in the town: lobar pneumonia, poorly controlled diabetes, alcoholic heart disease, dysfunctional families. In 1986, the companies tried to reverse some of the working practices secured over half-a-century before; there were certainly men doing the night shift when I was there, and blasting went on while the men remained underground in the canteens.
Global economics had made mining some of the poorer seams of less financial interest for the companies; in other words, the yield wasn’t high enough to justify the expense of hauling it out of the ground. So they started reworking the slagheaps, the biggest of which stood like a small table mountain behind the railway line from Sydney to Adelaide: the tailings from the old days still contained twelve or thirteen percent silver and zinc. This stirred up clouds of lead that settled on the town and created a generation of dogs with poor control of their hind legs, which didn’t impress the RSPCA or the townspeople: Public health inspectors came and went, dismissing the risk of lead poisoning in the children unless they went down on all fours like the town dogs and starting licking the ground. It was a folk memory. One biblically-minded indefatigable old miner I knew actually called his dog Neb, short for Nebuchadnezzar—his father had made sure he would never forget the time, a hundred years before, when smelters in the town and dry-boring in the mines had made lead poisoning a real threat, and no cats or dogs were to be found at all in certain parts of town.
Isolation and fear of losing a job made tough men malleable. Up the road, past the cemetery on Rakow Road with its bleak scrub and rows of miners’ graves, was the premonition that haunted Broken Hill: Silverton. Silverton had once been a mining town like Broken Hill; it had had a population of three thousand in 1885 and solid stone-fronted buildings, and then the mining companies had decided that the new town to the south-east was more interesting and that was the end of Silverton. Silverton was a ghost town; it had a pub with a few real locals and a spillover of tourists who came to see where they’d filmed Mad Max II and Razorback and the Castlemaine XXXX advert with the lager-drinking parrot, though word in the pub was that it couldn’t stand the stuff. It was where the Broken Hill people would go if they felt a need to commune with the bush but didn’t want the inconvenience of packing their four-wheel drives for the weekend. A little promontory looked out over the Mundi Mundi plains; people would park their cars there just before sunset, sit on the bonnets with a bottle of beer, and stare out as far as they could across the flatness until the sun was a deep red afterglow and coolness came up off the rocks. Beyond the horizon, in the direction they were facing, was Mount Hopeless, so called by the explorer Edward Eyre in 1840 when a belt of salt lakes prevented him from venturing further towards the centre of the continent.
A hundred years later, it looked as if Broken Hill might go the same way as Silverton. After all, the capital of the ‘Indies’, one of the most famous cities in the world after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, had disappeared into oblivion, along with its lode of silver, six miles across; it had been worked out by 1730. Situated high in the Andes in what would later become Bolivia, Potosí, with its garish wind furnaces and freezing rock pits was, according to its historians, hell on earth.
In the belly of the beast, I was now being driven in a shuttle up a long ramp with a solid cylindrical sheath of concrete and bundles of cables pinned at intervals to the wall. I looked at the shape they made with their machines, their bodies trembling as they drilled into and prised loose the orebody; the machines products of the same hard material they had to cut and blast, inimical to the human shapes dragging it out of time. These ores were the planet’s memory. It seemed small-scale awesomeness, the height of the tunnel making the figures of the miners look odd, macrocephalic, with their gumboots and overalls and steel cables coiled around their shoulders. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar, I thought for a moment, to what I did in the hospital on Tuesdays and Fridays, when I assisted the surgeon, introducing an endoscope with its little fibreoptic bougie down into someone’s intestine, a long snaking push through the oesophagus and into the vault-like sump of the stomach, a receptacle with its own groundwater and slurry.
I had to walk the rest of the way up the gob road to the stope—a huge cavernous working area. It was uncomfortably hot and the noise of machinery was constant. It seemed as if I was in the Paris catacombs restyled by Le Corbusier as a huge inverted skyscraper, and I had a sudden vision of the town on the surface pinned down to the surface like Gulliver. No one, looking at this unsteady town shimmering under the sky, would ever believe a kilometre-deep ballast prevented it from being traded to the desert like a mirage. Its layers were so ancient they went back to before life on Earth: there was nothing organic trapped within them, not a single fossil; and the only biomorphic beast around was a giant mechanical mollusc drilling into the seam in front, showering huge slabs of dark ore to the side. Usually the blasters lined the face with explosives and let them loosen the seam, before they prised it free; here they seemed to drilling a connecting passage between two levels. Had I wanted to ask I couldn’t have, since there was no way of making myself heard.
The days when miners brought their sprawlers and poppers down like exclamation marks on a hard intractable substance were long gone. Here, though, was where the sense of political cohesion had developed that translated into solidarity above ground; in tunnels that collapsed, in bad air, in grime, in massed assault, in the vertical time of the revolution, inside ‘Nature’s womb’.
It was still an activity that compelled imaginative assent. But it needed an elastic imagination to see all the strata where they worked, rested and played cards and darts as the different layers of Salomon’s House in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the underground chambers of which were six hundred fathoms deep. ‘These caves we call the lower region. And we use them for all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies. We use them likewise for the imitation of natural mines and the producing also of new artificial metals, by compositions and materials which we use and lay there for many years.’ Underground was dark and archaic. At ground level, there was the mounting heap of rejected awareness. After Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the fictional journey into the depths of the earth also extended into society, with the vision of society perched on a vast, dispensable and poorly defined ‘underclass’ that was vindicated in H. G. Wells’ subterranean anti-Utopia Things to Come. Mining was where the intellectual met the tough, since before digging became a respectable intellectual pursuit—one of our command metaphors for knowledge itself—only marginals and slaves had to dig. There were no givens: in this job, reality was what the mind sought out and won for itself.
Giant life returned to size coming back up to the surface in an old lift used to carrying far heavier loads that wobbled as it came up. As if language itself had been under pressure underground, the small party of visitors all started speaking at once; it had been small-scale Jules Verne, but we had travelled down into the heart of the lode; one of the sources of Australia’s wealth and a hidden city where the mind shucked off its own inertness.
On the surface the light was a shock, headachy and confusing. The South Mines enclosure looked bleached, our eyes recoiled. I felt a strange feeling of relief, as if I had doubted that I would return from the underground levels, and made a mental note to look up my Dante. ‘Here sighs and lamentations resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep. Strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sounds of hands, which made a tumult whirling through the air forever.’
Dostoevsky’s man from a hole in the ground comes up to the light of the ‘most abstract and intentional city in the world’ spoiling for a fight, enticed by what the Nevsky Prospect holds out—freedom from the caste structure that keeps him at the bottom. He dares to think himself on a footing with his social better, the officer who has yet to register his existence (who walked through him, as Dostoevsky puts it). ‘And lo and behold, the most astounding ideas dawned upon me! “What”, I thought, “if I meet him and—don’t move aside? What if I don’t move aside on purpose, even if I were to bump into him? How would that be?” This audacious idea little by little took such a hold on me that it gave me no peace. I dreamt of it continually.’ It’s only when he risks his person, like the Broken Hill miners, and confronts the ruling class in the person of the officer that he steps into his dignity. Underground heroes are something like Proustian snobs, only stood on their heads.
I wondered how often the Broken Hill miners thought about what their grandfathers and grandmothers had risked to throw off the dead weight of the past and create the kind of ebullient Australia Australians take for granted. Broken Hill was the pivot of the country’s modernity. Thinking themselves marginal would have been to adopt someone else’s vantage point.
As for myself, I cherished that morning when I went down and came back up again. I was in search of something approachable and met a mountain. There are few thoughts closer to the borders of terror than imagining the effort of breathing with the weight of the earth’s crust on top of you. When fear goes there’s only shame and the packed atomic darkness that even Dostoevsky’s underground man can’t budge with his shoulder. I often think of those miners about to lose their jobs. They didn’t think much of the work they did but they didn’t know what they’d do without it. I liked their cragginess and I liked their wives. They couldn’t understand what would drag anyone from ‘away’—of their own free will—to this place on the edge of the world.
There was no lack of light in Broken Hill. Next day walking to work in blinding sunlight and flies, across a ground marred by dry salt, I thought of going underground as the mirror-activity to that of the man in Plato’s cave who somehow wrenches free of the chain round his neck and goes out to contemplate the sun, only to go back in again to his comrades sitting observing the shadow-play in an icy Tartarus or Hades stuck like a tick on the rump of the earth. What he had seen was real. A mole-man, he lives strengthened by it, turning the light over and over in his mind till it becomes sheer flukish crystal. More than that. We set violence and reason over against each other. Plato tells us there is an affinity between them. Violence is the effort of the man chained in the cave to escape the dark and see the real.
Another writer who knew about mines and underground fires wrote that colours were light’s sufferings, material the gods concealed themselves with. If so, minerals must be the earth’s calluses, where it hauls itself over on its side—crystalline, nervy oxides propagated by attraction.