"What do you think?"
"Not much." Kraft let the small piece of ore slip from his hand. Its color was a deep, dusky red, like a clot of dried blood. As it rolled down the steep slope, William thought of tears of blood.
Sitting at the mouth of the mine, he had a pile of ore like that beneath him. It looked like liquid mixed with blood, pooled in empty eye sockets and ready to spill over.
For outsiders, seeing more of these mines didn't make them seem ordinary. The more they saw, the stranger it seemed that so many holes, large and small, had formed. The miners' wheezing breaths also made the mines seem all the more unsettling.
Over the past few days, at Kraft's request, Peter had taken them from one working mine to the next. Years of operation hadn't caused the settlements to grow. They remained family-based, with each village producing only as much as its transportation could carry.
The larger mines had been worked for generations. Young miners labored alongside their fathers, so familiar with the tunnels that they could warn visitors about a peculiar stone underfoot and remember which neighbor's boy had fallen there last time.
The tunnels went straight down without branching. Kraft followed them to where they usually worked, sometimes a walk of more than ten minutes. Then an invisible boundary divided their work area from "the depths." They stopped and got to work, leaving Kraft to see for himself what he might need.
They rarely saw the older generation. Those who were still around had lost the ability to work, and sat in the shade by the village walls, bare-chested, their breathing visibly labored. They showed the classic signs of difficulty inhaling: the skin over their sternums and collarbones sank deeply inward,