The treachery of sand

 

He found that he was moving in water, and that what he had under his feet was not stone but sludge.

It happens sometimes on the sea coast that a man walking at low tide far out along the beach suddenly finds that he is moving with difficulty. The going is heavy beneath his feet, no longer sand but glue. The surface is dry, but every footprint fills with water. Yet all the beach wears the same aspect, so that the eye cannot distinguish between what is firm and what is not. The walker continues on his way, tending to move inland and feeling no disquiet. Why should he? But it is as though the heaviness of his feet increases with every step he takes. Suddenly he sinks several inches. He pauses, and looking down at his feet sees that they have disappeared. He picks up his feet and tries to turn back, but only sinks in deeper. The sand is over his ankles. He struggles and finds it reaching his calves. With indescribable terror he realizes that he is in a patch of shifting sand, where a man cannot walk any more than a fish can swim. He flings away whatever he is carrying, shedding his cargo like a vessel in distress. It is too late, the sand has reached his knees.

He shouts, waving hat or handkerchief, while the sand gains upon him. If the beach is deserted and there is no heroic rescuer at hand, then he is done for, destined to be swallowed up, condemned to that appalling burial which can be neither hastened nor delayed, which may take hours, dragging down a strong and healthy man the more remorselessly the more he struggles. He sees the world vanish from his gaze; sky, land, and sea. There is nothing he can do. The sand creeps up to his stomach, his chest. He waves his arms, shouts and groans in torment; the sand reaches his shoulders and neck, until nothing is left but staring eyes and a crying mouth that is suddenly silenced. Only an extended arm remains. The man is gone.

This fateful occurrence, still possible on some seashores, was also possible thirty years ago in the Paris sewer. During the work begun in 1833 the underground network was subject to sudden collapses, when in particularly friable stretches of soil the bottom, whether of paving stones as in the old sewers, or concrete, as in the new, gave way. There were crevasses composed of shifting sand from the seashore, neither earth nor water. Sometimes the depth was very great.

Terrible to the in such a fashion. Death may mitigate its horror with dignity; at the stake or in a shipwreck nobility is possible. But this suffocation in the sewer is unclean. It is humiliating. Filth is synonymous with shame; it is squalid and infamous. To the in a butt of Malmsey, like the Duke of Clarence, may pass; but to the in a pit of slime… There is the darkness of Hell, the filth of evil; the dying man does not know whether he is to become a ghost or a toad.

Everywhere else the grave is sinister; here it is shapeless. The depth of these pits varied as did their length and density, according to the nature of the subsoil. Some were three or four feet in depth, others eight or ten; some had no bottom. The slime was almost solid in some places, almost liquid in others. A man might have taken a day to be swallowed up in the Lunière pit, a few minutes only in that of Phélippeaux, depending on the thickness of the slime. A child might be safe where a man would be lost. The first resource was to rid oneself of every burden, fling away one’s bag of tools or whatever it might be; and this was what every sewage-man did when he felt the ground unsafe beneath his feet.

The pits were due to various causes: the friability of the earth, collapses at some lower level, heavy showers in summer, incessant rain in winter, long steady drizzle. Sometimes the weight of the houses broke the roof of a gallery or caused a floor to give way. The settling of the Panthéon, a quarter of a century ago, destroyed a part of the caves under the Mont Sainte-Geneviève. When such things happened the evil in some cases was manifest in cracks in the street, and could be quickly remedied. But it also happened that nothing was visible from above, in which case, woe to the sewage-men. Entering the collapsed place unawares, they might be lost. Such cases are entered in the records. There are a number of names, including that of one Blaise Poutrain, buried in a pit under the Rue Carème-Prenant.

There was also the youthful and charming Vicomte d’Escoubleau, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, which they assailed in silk stockings, violins leading the way. D’Escoubleau, surprised one night in the bed of his cousin the Duchesse de Sourdis, was drowned in a pit in the Beautrellis sewer, when he sought to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis, learning the manner of his death, called for her smelling salts and was too busy inhaling them to weep. No love can survive such an event. Hero refuses to wash the corpse of Leander; This be holds her nose before Pyramus, saying, ‘Pooh!’.

From: LES MISÉRABLES

by VICTOR HUGO