4104



The Underground City



by Jules Verne






OR



The Black Indies

(Sometimes Called The Child of the Cavern)







CHAPTER I

CONTRADICTORY LETTERS





To Mr. F. R. Starr, Engineer, 30 Canongate, Edinburgh.



IF Mr. James Starr will come to-morrow to the Aberfoyle coal-mines,

Dochart pit, Yarrow shaft, a communication of an interesting nature

will be made to him.



"Mr. James Starr will be awaited for, the whole day,

at the Callander station, by Harry Ford, son of the old

overman Simon Ford."



"He is requested to keep this invitation secret."



Such was the letter which James Starr received by the first post,

on the 3rd December, 18--, the letter bearing the Aberfoyle postmark,

county of Stirling, Scotland.



The engineer's curiosity was excited to the highest pitch.

It never occurred to him to doubt whether this letter might

not be a hoax.  For many years he had known Simon Ford,

one of the former foremen of the Aberfoyle mines, of which he,

James Starr, had for twenty years, been the manager, or,

as he would be termed in English coal-mines, the viewer.

James Starr was a strongly-constituted man, on whom his fifty-five

years weighed no more heavily than if they had been forty.

He belonged to an old Edinburgh family, and was one of its

most distinguished members.  His labors did credit to the body

of engineers who are gradually devouring the carboniferous

subsoil of the United Kingdom, as much at Cardiff and Newcastle,

as in the southern counties of Scotland.  However, it was more

particularly in the depths of the mysterious mines of Aberfoyle,

which border on the Alloa mines and occupy part of the county

of Stirling, that the name of Starr had acquired the greatest renown.

There, the greater part of his existence had been passed.

Besides this, James Starr belonged to the Scottish Antiquarian Society,

of which he had been made president.  He was also included

amongst the most active members of the Royal Institution; and the

Edinburgh Review frequently published clever articles signed by him.

He was in fact one of those practical men to whom is due the prosperity

of England.  He held a high rank in the old capital of Scotland,

which not only from a physical but also from a moral point of view,

well deserves the name of the Northern Athens.



We know that the English have given to their vast extent of

coal-mines a very significant name.  They very justly call them

the "Black Indies," and these Indies have contributed perhaps

even more than the Eastern Indies to swell the surprising wealth

of the United Kingdom.



At this period, the limit of time assigned by professional men

for the exhaustion of coal-mines was far distant and there was

no dread of scarcity.  There were still extensive mines to be

worked in the two Americas.  The manu-factories, appropriated

to so many different uses, locomotives, steamers, gas works,

&c., were not likely to fail for want of the mineral fuel;

but the consumption had so increased during the last few years,

that certain beds had been exhausted even to their smallest veins.

Now deserted, these mines perforated the ground with their

useless shafts and forsaken galleries.  This was exactly the case

with the pits of Aberfoyle.



Ten years before, the last butty had raised the last ton of coal

from this colliery.  The underground working stock, traction engines,

trucks which run on rails along the galleries, subterranean tramways,

frames to support the shaft, pipes--in short, all that constituted

the machinery of a mine had been brought up from its depths.

The exhausted mine was like the body of a huge fantastically-shaped

mastodon, from which all the organs of life have been taken,

and only the skeleton remains.



Nothing was left but long wooden ladders, down the Yarrow shaft--the only

one which now gave access to the lower galleries of the Dochart pit.
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