Tales of Two Countries by Maksim Gorky

“I was afraid at times. The earth must have some feeling, don’t you think? When we had burrowed to a great depth, when we had made this wound in the mountain, she received us rudely enough. She breathed a hot breath on us that made the heart stop beating, made the head dizzy and the bones to ache. Many experienced this. Then the mother earth showered stones upon her children, poured hot water over us; ay, there was fear in it, signor! Sometimes, in the torchlight, the water became red and my father told me that we had wounded the earth and that she would drown us, would burn us all up with her blood—’you will live to see it!’ It was all fancy, like enough, but when one hears such words deep in the bowels of the earth—in the damp and suffocating darkness, amid the plaintive splashing of water and the grinding of iron against stone—one forgets for the moment how much is fantasy. For everything was fantastic there, dear signor: we men were so puny, while the mountain, into whose belly we were boring, reached up to the sky. One must see in order to understand it. It is necessary to see the black gaping mouth cut by us, tiny people, who entered it at sunset—and how sadly the sun looks after those who desert him and go into the bowels of the earth! It is necessary to see our machines and the grim face of the mountain, and to hear the dark rumblings in it and the blasts, like the wild laughter of a madman.”