Bottomless pit

“ On the crest of the sand-bank a line of flaring scarlet poppies that had dreamed motionless in the hot, airless sunshine throughout the day quivered and shook their garish heads, as though a little breeze had touched them, and a tiny cascade of dry sand poured down into the pit at the foot of the bank with a soft hissing sound, drowned by the bearing note of Aire's sharp-edged, polished shovel as it cut into the remaining pile. ”

“ I had fortunately arrived in time to see the blastings. Those in the great pit are the most interesting; for its mouth is so very large, that it is not necessary to descend in order to see the pit-men work; all is visible from above. This is a very peculiar and interesting sight. The pit, 480 feet deep, with its colossal doors and entrances leading into the galleries, looks like a picture of the lower world, from which bridges of rocks, projections, arches and caverns formed in the walls, ascend to the upper world. ”

“ The pit is about twelve feet deep and ten feet in width, and its outside edge is lined with a hedge five or six feet in height. As the fierce brute steals upon his intended prey, he nears the hedge and at one spring its highest branch is cleared. He reaches the earth only to find himself at the bottom of a deep pit, from which there is no hope of escape, and where he speedily becomes the merciless victim of a shower of deadly arrows and bullets. ”

“ She heard, as she came up, the clash of iron and the grinding of heavy shovels from the pit, and as she rounded a high heap of waste gravel, she saw him.
He was balancing upon a red terrace of the gravel, packed almost as hard as solid stone, driving the bar deep into a hole for leverage enough to pry off a mass of the stuff for the man to shovel away below. He was intent on the work, and swung the bar vertically with a savage energy. She watched him in silence.
He was dressed as of old in the stained and shapeless corduroy and huge heavy boots. ”

“ Centuries have bedecked and adorned the sides of this stupendous pit; and while naked sheets and planes of colour, the work of recent years, still gleam starkly, all innocent of blade and leaf, elsewhere in deserted galleries and among cliff-faces torn bare by vanished generations of men, green things have made their home and flourished with luxuriance, to the eternal drip of surface water. ”

“ In a frenzy of delight men danced and leaped and capered upon the edge of the Pit, clasping their arms about each other, shaking each others' hands, cheering and hurrahing till their strained voices became hoarse and faint. ”

“ The Covered Pit is in a little branch to the left; this pit is twelve or fifteen feet in diameter, covered with a thin rock, around which a narrow crevice extends, leaving only a small support on one side. There is a large rock resting on the centre of the cover. The sound of a waterfall may be heard from the pit but cannot be seen. ”

“ Those which are exhibited in menageries have generally been caught in pits. The pit is dug where traces have been discovered of a Lion’s path; and it is then covered with sticks and turf. He is deceived by the appearance of solidity presented by the turf, and attempts to walk over it; but the moment he sets his foot upon the covering of the trap, it breaks beneath his weight, and he falls into the pit. ”

“ The pit was reached, and in spite of his cries strong hands pushed him forward and over the edge. Down, down he fell into the blackness, until with a terrible thud he reached the bottom. There was no water to break his fall, for the pit was dry. ”

“ A pit is dug in the earth, which is lined with heated stones, on which the hog is placed, having hot stones in its belly, and is covered with other hot stones, when the pit is covered up like a grave. ”

“ The mouth of the pit is then covered with wooden boards and plastered over with mud with great care to prevent a child falling into it; as it is held that nothing which has once gone into the pit may be taken out, even if it were a human being. It is said that once in the old days a man who happened to fall into the pit was buried alive, its mouth being covered over with planks of wood ”

“ All through the Northwest, all through the central world of the Wheat the set and whirl of that innermost Pit made itself felt; and it spread and spread and spread till grain in the elevators of Western Iowa moved and stirred and answered to its centripetal force, and men upon the streets of New York felt the mysterious tugging of its undertow engage their feet, embrace their bodies, overwhelm them, and carry them bewildered and unresisting back and downwards to the Pit itself. ”

“ A yawning pit, partially concealed by a screen of hurdles and bracken, lay across the narrow way, while a score of paces beyond was a tree trunk, which, having been skilfully cut through close to its base, needed but little effort to fall into its present position, effectually barring the road to any but unmounted men. ”

“ The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by any thing we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I work in; it is very hard work for a woman. The pit is very wet where I work, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs ”

“ But that was near an alder, and not an elder, tree; and, so far as is known, the pit which leads to the Elder Cave has no associations so tragic as those which are inseparable from the horrible brutalities of "Titus Andronicus." Its mouth is not covered with "rude growing briars," nor are there upon the leaves "drips of new-shed blood as fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers." On the contrary, it is a rather cheerful-looking pit, filled up with foliage like an arborescent bouquet in an enormous natural vase. ”

“ The hole through which we are looking is cut through one side of this well, so that there is a great deal of it above us as well as below; but although we hold our lanterns up, hoping to see the top, we can see nothing but pitchy darkness up there. The roof of this pit is too high for the light to strike upon it. ”

“ And now, over the raging shriek of winds from the pit, came another sound to the crouching Rowan's ears, a faint but deep bellowing which grew swiftly louder. He saw the lizard-men at the pit's edge stir, look downward, and then suddenly there rose up out of the great shaft's depths a great, round platform of metal, a mighty, disklike platform fully four hundred feet across which all but filled the mouth of the great pit as it rose, separated from that pit's edge by a tiny circular gap of a yard or less. ”

“ They have a very ingenious method of taking game by pitfalls. They dig four or five pits eight feet deep, ten long and four wide, fifty or sixty and sometimes 100 feet from each other, not in a straight line, but so placed that when they make a fence from one to the other it would form the letter V; at the point would be the pit, and no hedge, so that an animal wanting to pass through would walk down to the opening, and as the pit would be beautifully covered over with small sticks and grass, made a very inviting road to walk over. ”

“ That the sand-heap dug out of a pit is counted in with the depth of the pit as to height to complete the ten spans. We have also learned thus in a Boraitha: One must not draw water from a pit in public ground which is ten spans deep and four spans wide, unless he has made a railing round the pit that is ten spans high. ”

“ But nothing like a war of the worlds was taking place about her and the only really ominous thing about the pit was its proximity to the scene of a brutal slaying.
In the depth of the excavation the sunlight seemed deeper and redder than it should have been, the shadows so thickly clustering that they seemed to be conspiring together to cast a pall upon her spirits. But she refused to allow the dismalness of the pit to upset her. Any deep, hewed-out hollow in the earth was dismal, with the damp smells of freshly-turned earth conjuring up a cemetery-like atmosphere. ”

“ A deep pit was dug in the ground and stout poles were placed leaning together like a tepee, with a hole at the centre. The earth was heaped up around and upon the top, very much as eastern farmers cover their potato pits. ”

“ The wells are ten in number, and the narrow gorge by which they are approached is not ten yards broad. The springs, however, are very abundant. Wherever a pit is dug five or six feet deep, it is immediately filled with water. ”

“ There is one thing, however, in which the pit have much to amend. Their destitution of gallantry is extraordinary, especially for a body so ready to accept the clap-traps of the stage, in praise of their "manly hearts," and their "guardianship of the fair." Nothing is more common than to see women standing at the sides of the pit benches, while no one thinks of offering them a seat. Room even is not made, though it often might be. ”

“ And all these sounds, the chatter of the telegraph, the intoning of the messenger boys, the shouts and cries of clerks and traders, the shuffle and trampling of hundreds of feet, the whirring of telephone signals rose into the troubled air, and mingled overhead to form a vast note, prolonged, sustained, that reverberated from vault to vault of the airy roof, and issued from every doorway, every opened window in one long roll of uninterrupted thunder. In the Wheat Pit the bids, no longer obedient of restraint, began one by one to burst out, like the first isolated shots of a skirmish line. ”

“ They passed through the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now, and through the turnpike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew ”

“ Instead of chattering about roses and rainbows, you ought to be thinking of the awful black pit at the end of the road.”
His words chilled the young men and maidens, like wind from a cavern. They looked at each other thoughtfully, and said, “Why does he try to spoil our sport with stories of pitfalls and invisible giants? We don’t know where the pitfalls are; and if we go poking on the ground for them, how can we see the sunshine and the birds?” Some of the more merry began to laugh at the solemn traveller, and soon they were all dancing again, or hurrying after the rainbow castles. ”

“ If there were danger, it mattered not. She strode down with giant steps, she plunged, she started avalanches to ride them until they stopped, she leaped, and lastly she fell, to roll over the soft cinders to the pit.
There she lay. It seemed a comfortable resting place. The pit was scarcely six feet across. She gazed upward and was astounded. How steep was the rounded slope on all sides! There were no sides; it was a circle. She looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky. Such depth of blue, such exquisite rare color! Carley imagined she could gaze through it to the infinite beyond. ”

“ A plan of taking game which must have readily suggested itself to rude hunters was the pitfall, in its simplest shape a mere hole too deep for a heavy beast to get out of when it has fallen in. The savage trapper will dig such a pit, and cover it with brushwood or sods, as in Africa the bushmen take the huge hippopotamus and elephant, while in fur-countries the hunters arrange their pitfalls in various ways, the most artificial plan being to cover them with a wooden floor which upsets when trodden on. ”

“ The trap was then raised, and a glimpse was caught of a huge black, seething, writhing, swarming hole. It was but a glimpse, for those who looked in were glad to draw back, half stifled by the heat and stench which escaped from the pit. ”

“ The fact that modern tree roots invariably sought the richer soil of the pits' contents makes it quite probable that there are numerous other pits on the site that are still hidden beneath standing trees or cut stumps.
Dating: There is little doubt that Pit A was filled during the first decade of the 18th century.
PIT B
This pit (T.N. 30) was approximately circular, with a diameter of 9 ft. 4 in. and a maximum depth of 2 ft. 8 in. It was covered by part of the kitchen's north wall and by the whole of the east side of the kitchen chimney. ”

“ It was, indeed, one of the most singular-looking places imaginable, and we could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it altogether the work of nature. The pit, from its eastern to its western extremity, was about five hundred yards in length, when all its windings were threaded; the distance from east to west in a straight line not being more (I should suppose, having no means of accurate examination) than forty or fifty yards. ”

“ Though each pair of birds excavate their own tunnel, yet the whole community, or, at any rate, a large proportion of it, will sometimes work together, sweeping on to the pit's face in a body, clinging there and burrowing, with a constant twittering, then darting off silently in a cloud and sailing and circling round in the pit's amphitheatre, making, when the sky is blue and the sun bright, a warm and delicious picture such as the Greeks must have loved to gaze on. ”

“ With superhuman strength he began to open the pit, scattering the half-charred logs right and left, and giving vent to the suffocating gases that rose from the now incandescent charcoal. At times the fury of the gale would drive it back and hold it against the sides of the pit, leaving the opening free; at times, following the blind instinct of habit, the demented man would fall upon his face and bury his nose and mouth in the wet bark and sawdust. ”