Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ... PEEFACE In this book we meet with one who works in the bowels of the earth, boring, mining, undermining. | You can watch him, provided you have eyes for such wojk 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 were 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. ud 2 Indeed, my patient friends, in this late preface, which might well-nigh have become a necrologue, a funeral oration, I will tell you what I sought in those depths: for, you see, I have returned and--what is more---safe and sound. Do not think that I intend to invite you to the same hazardous enterprise! Ox even to the same solitude! For whoever pursues a course of his own, meets nobody: this is peculiar to the "course of one's own." Nobody comes to his assistance; any danger, emergency, wickedness and bad weather, has to be faced alone. He has his own way--and, as is fair, experiences bitterness, and occasional annoyance at this "course of his own ": such as, for instance, the conviction that even his friends cannot make out who he is, whither he is...