“I never experienced fear there. Once we drove into a sea eye with the cutter loader. I was swept down by water. Sea eyes are such caverns. There are spaces in the ground, such a cave, and inside it there is salty, aggressive, like sea water. Nobody knows where it is. We did the geological survey to explore it. It could be detected when it started to soak. It is called ´štus´. At first it goes slowly, then it becomes bigger, bigger and suddenly it explodes. Water is worse than fire. And so it happened to me. It flooded the whole crosscut, it was in the whole mine. It depends what the sea eye is like. The eighth floor was flooded, we were working in the ninth. The whole floor… Nobody was hurt, just I escaped only just. I sent my boys away. But nothing, I was just a bit bruised. It buried us. Sometimes I had such injuries, it is not possible without them. Nearly all fingers broken… There is for example a seam. We were cutting along the seam, the coal, and we had to search for the coal, it disappears. The coal goes for example horizontally and suddenly it drops for about three metres down, so we had to go back and do an inclined plane. An incline plane is such a hill, and to drive into the seam. There are such free spaces between it, where there are for example the varicoloured levels. It is a soap stone, treacherous. It is green, red, white. It has various colours. It is such a nice stone, but treacherous and it doesn´t warn you. A normal top wall, it is slate, sandstone, pudding stone, such various stones can warn you. When it starts to scatter, then out. Away. In a while it fell. But the varicoloured levels don´t do anything. You couldn´t be up to it. Suddenly it fell. And we had to work underneath it. One or two were guarding and I had to go there first. I couldn´t let the boys go there. I was responsible for them. The worst were also hats. We called them hats. It was also in a slate ceiling. I was good at it already. They were tree trunks which had rotted. Stone became from them. The cortex – coal became from it. You only had to knock at it and a stone like this table here fell down. It fell sometimes also from its own, how many miners it killed, but I knew exactly already where it was. It is routine. You must be alert, you can´t be phlegmatic. After shooting I had to go first, I didn´t let the boys go there. When you shoot, everything is free, isn´t it. It is an open space, a room, and above you there is a ceiling with stones. I had to take such an old brace and go around it behind me. Now such rails came up, on them we put wood to hold the ceiling a bit at least. Then there were other works. When I had secured it, we climbed in already. We bored there three ropes, we called it ´klamoro´- scraper. Such a spoon was moving there and through a roller it was grubbed out. After we had grubbed it, we inbuilt it into the corf. And so on again and again… The mine had nine floors and it was eight hundred metres deep.”