Finally they came to another shaft, filled with water almost to the top. Theodor reached down into the water with a rag, and handed it to the engineer. Bosboom clapped it to his shoulder, and began examining the equipment lying on the tunnel floor, moving his lamp around as he did.

There was a cast iron pump secured to a hoisting rig, connected to a long canvas hose stretched out along the tunnel, and a loose coil of electrical cable running down from the end of the wooden raceway. The engineer looked it all over. Then he knelt down and took a close look at the pump.

He sniffed at it. "What on earth? Ohhhhh. "

The boss snapped, "What now?"

"Just a moment, while I make certain." Bosboom took the rag off his shoulder and wiped the nameplate clean. He brought his lamp up close.

"Well. To start with, this isn't a mine pump. It's for a village water supply system, and it's only meant for clean water with no muck in it. If the length of that discharge hose is any indication, it can't possibly force water up from anything like the depth of this shaft, and I don't see the pressure relief valve it's supposed to have in case of a blocked outlet line. That's why it stalled out and overloaded the wiring. There's no fused disconnect switch on the wall here. Now that I think of it, I didn't see one at the mine entrance either. On top of everything else, you had the fuses at the generator bypassed. This motor smells like it's cooked."

Winkler looked wide-eyed at him. " Cooked? Why would anybody cook a motor?"

Bosboom's shoulders shook for a moment. He coughed, then got out, "Sorry. A figure of speech I heard at the factory. It means it was probably ruined by overheating."

"So what does this mean? How do I make this pump the water out of here so we can get down to the ore seam?"

"With this pump alone? You can't. It's impossible. The most it could do is push the water up the entrance shaft and out of the mine, if you didn't have a drain tunnel at this level."