Across the flat plain, under the starless night, as dark and thick as ink, a man was walking alone along the high road from Marchiennes to Montsou, a straight road, six kilometers long, paved, which cart ruts had scarred with streaks of hardened mud. Before him, he saw nothing, not even the black ground, and he was only aware of the immense flat horizon by the gusts of the March wind, broad squalls like those at sea, freezing from having swept over leagues of marshes and bare earth. Not the shadow of a tree stained the sky, the paving unrolled with the rectitude of a pier in the vague middle of the expanse. And the man, at every step, felt that he was sinking further into this void, where he feared he would no longer find the earth. He was hungry, he was cold, he was weary, lost. For an hour he had been walking, and, before him, always the same plain, the same road, the same empty sky. He had met only a carrier's wagon, whose horses, snorting, blew with terror at the passing of this human apparition. All of a sudden, he bumped into the first houses of Montsou. Two or three low brick shacks, which were sleeping, let out the glow of an oil lamp through the slit of a shutter. And he stopped, surprised by the silence. He heard only the sound of his iron-shod boots on the pavement, a dull sound, which rang false, like that of a man beating the ground with his fists. He was overwhelmed, his legs shattered, and he let himself fall onto a bench in front of a door. Then, from this rest, an acute suffering seized him. He was forty-five years old, and he had not eaten for two days. He had set out on the road, driven from Marchiennes, where he had worked as a carpenter, by the crisis of unemployment which was desolating the region. He had walked until nightfall, without meeting a charitable soul, and he had slept in a haystack towards the middle of the road. Now, he was broken, his limbs shattered, his head empty, his stomach twisted by an unquenched hunger. He looked around him, in the shadow, at the low houses, the vacant lots, the piles of bricks, the factory chimneys, which rose like towers in the night. And he saw, far off on the horizon, the fires of the blast furnaces, red flames which seemed to emerge from the earth like giant torches. He remained a long time, motionless, his eyes lost in this glow. Then, he got up, and he continued his road. He walked another half-hour, and he arrived at Le Voreux. The pit was there, in the middle of a plain, surrounded by brick buildings of unequal height. A large chimney, sixty meters high, stood all black in the empty sky. The shaft, six hundred meters deep, was surrounded by an iron framework, and a steam engine of a thousand horsepower operated the cages. Le Voreux was an important pit, one of the richest of the Montsou Mining Company. But at this hour of the night, it was silent, asleep. Only a watchman, sitting near a coke fire in a shack, was waiting. The man approached, looked for a long time, and he thought of the earth, of this earth which had swallowed up so much misery, and which, every day, gave back a little. He sat down on a pile of coal, and he too waited for day.