It took my fancy
off-hand, that knick-knack. It's an old pattern of hatchet."
It was indeed an old pattern, a sharpened flint hafted with an old
brown bone--quite a prehistoric tool in appearance.
"Very handy," said Tulacque, fingering it. "Yes, not badly thought
out. Better balanced than the regulation ax. That'll be useful to
me, you'll see." As he brandishes that ax of Post-Tertiary Man, he
would himself pass for an ape-man, decked out with rags and lurking
in the bowels of the earth.
One by one we gathered, we of Bertrand's squad and the half-section,
at an elbow of the trench. Just here it is a little wider than in
the straight part where when you meet another and have to pass you
must throw yourself against the side, rub your back in the earth and
your stomach against the stomach of the other.
Our company occupies, in reserve, a second line parallel. No night
watchman works here. At night we are ready for making earthworks in
front, but as long as the day lasts we have nothing to do. Huddled
up together and linked arm in arm, it only remains to await the
evening as best we can.
Daylight has at last crept into the interminable crevices that
furrow this part of the earth, and now it finds the threshold of our
holes. It is the melancholy light of the North Country, of a
restricted and muddy sky, a sky which itself, one would say, is
heavy with the smoke and smell of factories. In this leaden light,
the uncouth array of these dwellers in the depths reveals the stark
reality of the huge and hopeless misery that brought it into being.
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