"Jules Verne. The Underground City OR The Black Indies" - читать интересную книгу автора

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.
Above ground, the sheds, formerly sheltering the outside works,
still marked the spot where the shaft of that pit had been sunk,