the most final
concluding work

The mine "Dophinovka" produced cubics – three-dimensional freestone blocks of 20 cm x 20 cm x 40 cm cut out from the underground limestone strata. For which purpose, there was a drift tunnel dipping from the wide pit and going under 38 meters of other stratification layers. Down the tunnel, here and there, the shafts were branching out on one or another of its sides—also tunnels, but lower and narrower—just like boughs from a tree trunk. At the end of those shaft-galleries, there were placed the stone-cutting machines which cut cubics from the wall in front of their noses. Such was the general, birds-eye-view, picture…

As for the details, my instructor in the roof-fastener job bore a sonorous name of ancient Russ princes – Rostislav. However, he never responded to this name because even to him it sounded strange and foreign, since everyone knew and addressed him as Charlic.

First of all, he led me to the shaft of Machine 3 because of his humble trepidation before its operator, whom Charlic titled exclusively with his patronymic "Kapitonovich". Being just a petty demon, Charlic at every turn made up to Kapitonovich, a stout devil of esteem, who had once served a stretch of ten years.

Both Charlic and I walked holding a flashlight in hand. Going down to the mine, everyone received his flashlight from Lyouda Aksyanova, the lamp-rechargeress, in her cave by the entrance to the main tunnel. Without the light, down there you got into the wholesome pitch-black darkness and could easily stumble over a rail of the narrow-gauge track, or against one of the rarely put ties under it, and have a nasty fall. That's why everyone in the mine wore a plastic helmet and each morning, before going down, they scribbled their signatures in a ledger to testify that they got instructed on safety rules and now knew their risks and were up to them.

The temperature in the mine was always above zero, even in winter. A constant calm and pressing, underwater silence reigned in the shafts if no one talked to someone else and no mechanism was working nearby… We walked and walked along a narrow low gallery, one wall of which bore serifs from a stone-cutting saw and the other was screened off by a hedge of cubic debris. A loose pair of thick electric wires in white isolation ran along atop the hedge which was rather tall but did not reach the gallery ceiling. In mining, the ceiling is called roof, but more on that later…

At last, far ahead appeared dim yellow light of a pair of bulbs thru their scaly incrustation of thick dust. The stone-cutting machine stood facing the end wall, and Kapitonovich sat in its open seat waiting for us. He worked without an assistant because his dream was to one day get paid 300 rubles a month.

The stone in the end wall before the machine – 2,5 m x 4,5 m – was already crisscrossed with deep furrows of "the sketch" whose parallel cuts ran horizontally between sidewalls and were intersected by vertical ones cut that same way from the ceiling to the floor. The grid formed the butt ends of the future cubics. Now, you just needed to drive a breaker in one of the slots in the middle of the "sketch" and break a cubic out. Then a couple of cubics next to it, until there formed a niche roomy enough to allow for breaking the rest of them off with a sledgehammer.

Kapitonovich was waiting for us because in the past 2 days his stone-cutting machine moved forward, away from the end of the narrow-gauge track. Charlic and I extend the railroad with two pairs of three-meter rails, delivered the day before, and now the mine cars, aka wagonettes, could be pushed closer to the end wall to stack the broken out cubics upon them… If an empty wagonette capsized off the rails, the situation was called "a bored-in wagonette" and 2 or 3 workers heaved it back in the track, the method being named "fart-steamer". Then a tiny mining locomotive would come down from the open pit, and pull back the wagonettes loaded with the cubics, collecting on its way up the loaded wagonettes waiting in the entrances to other cutting-machines' shafts.

Not all of the cubics were breaking evenly off the wall, so before the next "sketching" the most sticking out pieces of the limestone had to be knocked off with that same sledgehammer. Those fragments together with the spoilage—cubics broken off too short, or split because of the stratum faults in the stone—served the material to continue laying of the hedge-screen along the shaft wall. Without that masonry, there would be no room to shove the sand off.

Where did the sand come from? When the cutting-machine, with growling din and clang of its chain, was cutting a furrow in the wall, a long jet of sand, or rather sawdust gushed out into the shaft. The shield of metal-slatted glass protected the operator from the whipping sand, although not from the clouds of dust. The sand pile rose like a dune around the cutting-machine, and if not shoved off with a shovel into the "pocket", between the hedge and the wall, there would be no room for the narrow-gauge track…

With the track-promotion accomplished, Charlic took the helmet off his head, put it down and sat upon as on a potty – that's much more comfortable than sitting on the floor, or on a heap of sand or rubble. He lit a Prima begged from Kapitonovich and reverently inquired about the meaning of the large blood-red stains in the right wall of the gallery cut through the hard mass of stone.

Kapitonovich with portent gravity forwarded his explanation that once there was the sea around here with a steamboat on fire, which, eventually, sank, leaving the red of the flames in the stone. Charlic gave out a servile giggle, while I was trying to suppress the unnecessary contemplation that ten years was the standard stretch provided for murder because I liked Kapitonovich.

Before leaving for other cutting-machines, we fixed the roof in the shaft. For that purpose, Kapitonovich started the machine and cut a series of short horizontal slots under the very ceiling of the gallery. When the stone plates between the slots were crushed away with the breaker, a mortice of 20 cm x 20 cm and 40 cm deep was formed up there. The same operation was done on the opposite wall.

Then Charlic and I fetched an 18-cm-thick log, of those named ploshchuk in the mine lingo, and thrust its end into one of the niches, as deep as it could go. The other end we raised to the opposite niche and shoved inside, not too deep though, so as not to pull the log out from the first one. We propped it up by the sidewalls with a pair of shorter stoyak logs. Now the shaft roof was fixed.

Where did the 3 logs come from? Very simple, retreating our way about some 30 meters back into the darkness of the shaft, we pulled out one of the previous fastenings. Where else could they be from?. In the period of my work at the "Dophinovka" mine, there were shipped exactly 3 new logs there. I personally bared them of bark with the "stroog" tool (kinda ax welded crosswise to a breaker's end) before Slavic Aksyanov took them into the drift tunnel on a wagonette…