PREFACE
1
In this book we meet with one who works in the bowels of the earth, boring, mining, undermining. You can watch hin, provided you have eyes for such work of the deep—proceeding slowly, prudently, gently, inexorably, without betraying the weariness which follows in the train of every long privation of light and air; you might even call him happy, in spite of his work in the dark. Does it not seem as though some faith wore leading him, some solace compensating him for his labour? As though he himself wished for a prolonged obscurity, something incomprehensible, hidden, mysterious, knowing that, in the end, he will have his own morning, his own deliverance, his own dawn of day! Yes, indeed, he will return: do not ask him what he seeks in yonder depths, he, the apparent trophonios and “subterraneous worker,” will tell you of his own accord as soon as he will have once more “become man.” One gets rid of a silent tongue after having been so long a mole and alone in the earth.
