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Welcome back, everyone, to 1001 Classic Short Stories and Tales. This is your host, John Hagedorn. I have a great Rudyard Kipling story for you today, called At 22. In the coalfields of colonial India, danger didn't announce itself. It seeped, silently, through the earth. Rudyard Kipling's At 22 is one of his most gripping industrial tales, a story where human frailty, superstition, and sheer instinct collide deep underground. It begins in the Jimmy Hara Collieries, a place carved by sweat and pickaxes, where men work in darkness so complete that even a blind miner can move through it like a king. At the center of the story stands Janky Mia, old, sightless, stubborn, and feared. For thirty years he has navigated the twenty-two shaft with uncanny certainty, hoarding lamp oil, defying overseers, and clinging to the one thing the mine has never taken from him, his pride. Around him swirl younger men, jealous men, scheming men, and a beautiful young wife who sees far more than he does. But when the monsoon breaks and the Tarachunda River rises, the mind becomes a trap. Floodwater crashes through forgotten workings, lamps sputter out, and entire gangs vanish in the dark. In that moment, when panic grips the tunnels and the air itself turns deadly, the only hope lies with the blind man, who is always seen. What follows is one of Kipling's finest feats of tension, a desperate crawl through abandoned galleries, a race against rising water, and a reminder that knowledge earned in darkness can save lives when daylight pales. At 22 is not just a mining story. It's a testament to human stubbornness, courage, and the strange ways wisdom survives where sight does not. And now our story. At 22 by Rudyard Kipling. narrow as the womb deep as the pit and dark as the heart of a man santhal miner's proverb a weaver went out to reap but stay to unravel the corn stalks ha ha is there any sense in a weaver junkie mia glared at kundo but as junkie mia was blind Good. Cundu was not impressed. He had come to argue with Janky Mia, and, if chance favored, to make love to the old man's pretty young wife. This was Cundu's grievance, and he spoke in the name of all the five men who, with Janky Mia, composed the gang in No. 7 Gallery of 22. Janky Mia had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jemahan collieries with pick and crowbar. All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil, just as if he had been an eyed miner.

What Kundu's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janky Mia's selfishness. He would not add the oil to the common stock of his gang, but would save it and sell it. "'I knew these workings before you were born,' Janky Mia used to reply. "'I don't need the light to get my coal out, and I'm not going to help you. the oil is mine and i intend to keep it a strange man in many ways was jonkey mia the white-haired hot-tempered sightless weaver who had turned pit man all day long except on sundays and mondays when he was usually drunk he worked in the 22 shaft of the jimahari colliery as cleverly as a man with all the senses at evening he went up in the great steam-hauled cage to the pit bank and there called for his pony, a rusty, cold, dusty beast nearly as old as Janky Mia. The pony would come to his side, and Janky Mia would clamber onto its back and be taken at once to the plot of land which he, like the other miners, received from the Jimhari Company. The pony knew that place, and when, after six years, the company changed all the allotments to prevent the miners from acquiring proprietary rights, Janky Mia represented, with tears in his eyes, that were his holdings shifted, he would never be able to find his way to the new one. "'My horse only knows that place,' pleaded Janky Mia, and so he was allowed to keep his land. On the strength of this concession and his accumulated oil savings, Janky Mia took a second wife, a girl of the Jolaha main stock of the Mia's, and singularly beautiful. Janky Mia could not see her beauty, wherefore he took her on trust and forbade her to go down to the pit. He had not worked for thirty years in the dark without knowing that the pit was no place for pretty women. He loaded her with ornaments, not brass or pewter, but real silver ones, and she rewarded him by flirting outrageously with Kundu of No. 7 Gallery Gang. Kundu was really the gang head, but Janki Mia insisted upon all the work being entered in his own name, and chose the men that he worked with. Custom, stronger even than the Jimmy Hari Company, dictated that Jahnke might, by right of his years, should manage these things, and should, also, work despite his blindness. In Indian mines, where they cut into the solid coal with the pick and clear it out from floor to ceiling, he could come to no great harm. At home, where they undercut the coal and bring it down in crashing avalanches from the roof, he would never have been allowed to set foot in a pit. He was not a popular man, because of his oil savings, but all the gangs admitted that the Jahnke knew all the workings that had ever been sunk or worked since the Jimihari Company first started operations on the Terachunda fields. Pretty little Unda only knew that her old husband was a fool who could be managed. She took no interest in the collieries, except insofar as they swallowed up Kundu five days out of the seven, and covered him with coal dust. Kundu was a great workman, and did his best not to get drunk,

because, when he had saved forty rupees, Unda was to steal everything that she could find in Junkie's house, and run with Kundu to a land where there were no mines, and everyone kept three fat bullocks and a milch buffalo. While this scheme ripened, it was his custom to drop in a pawn janky and worry him about the oil savings. Onda sat in a corner and nodded approval. On the night when Kundu had quoted that objectionable proverb about weavers, janky grew angry. Listen, you pig, said he. Blind I am, and old I am. but, before you were ever born, I was gray among the coal. Even in the days when the twenty-two cod was unsunk and there were not two thousand men here, I was known to have all the knowledge of the pits. What working is there that I do not know? From the bottom of the shaft to the end of the last drive. Is it the Barumba cod, the oldest, or the twenty-two, where Tibu's gallery runs up to number five? "'Hear the old fool talk,' said Kundu, nodding to Unda. "'No gallery of twenty-two will cut into five before the end of the rains. "'We have a month's solid coal before us. "'The babooji says so.' "'Babooji! "'Pig! "'Dog! "'What do these fat slugs from Calcutta know? "'He draws and draws and draws, and talks and talks and talks, "'and his maps are all wrong.' I, Janki, knows that this is so. When a man has been shut up in the dark for thirty years, God gives him knowledge. The old gallery that Tibu's gang made is not six feet from number five. Without doubt, God gives the blind knowledge, said Kundu, with a look at Unda. Let it be as you say. I, for my part, do not know where lies the gallery of Tibu's gang. But I am not a withered monkey who needs oil to grease his joints with. Cundu swung out of the hut laughing and under-giggled. Jahnke turned his sightless eyes toward his wife and swore I have land and I have sold a great deal of lamp oil but I was a fool to marry this child. A week later the rain set in with a vengeance and the gangs paddled about in coal slush at the pit banks. Then the big mine pumps were made ready and the manager of the colliery plowed through the wet toward the Territundi River swelling between its soppy banks. Lord, send that this beastly beck doesn't misbehave, said the manager, piously, and he went to take counsel with his assistant about the pumps. But the Terachundi misbehaved very much indeed. After a fall of three inches of rain in an hour, it was obliged to do something. It topped its bank and joined the flood water that was hemmed between two low hills just where the embankment of the colliery main line crossed. When a large part of the rain-fed river and a few acres of flood water made a dead set for a nine-foot culvert. The culvert may spout its finest, but the water cannot all get out.

The manager pranced upon one leg with excitement, and his language was improper. He had reason to swear, because he knew that one inch of water on land meant a pressure of one hundred tons to the acre, and here were about five feet of water forming. Behind the railway embankment, over the shallower workings at twenty-two, You must understand that, in a coal mine, the coal nearest to the surface is worked first from the central shaft. That is to say, the miners may clear out the stuff to within 10, 20, or 30 feet of the surface, and when all is worked out, leave only a skin of earth upheld by some few pillars of coal. In a deep mine where they know that they have any amount of material at hand, the men prefer to get all their mineral out at one shaft, rather than make a number of little holes to tap the comparatively unimportant surface coal, and the manager watched the flood. The culvert spouted a nine-foot gush, but the water still formed, and word was sent to clear the men out of twenty-two. The cages came up crammed, and crammed again, with the men nearest the pit-eye, as they called the place where you could see daylight from the bottom of the main shaft. All away and away up the long black galleries, the flare lamps were winking and dancing like so many fireflies, and the men and women waited for the clanking, rattling, thundering cages to come down and fly up again. But the outworkings were very far off, and word could not be passed quickly, though the heads of the gangs and the assistant shouted and swore and tramped and stumbled. The manager kept one eye on the great troubled pool behind the embankment, and prayed that the culvert would give way and let the water through in time. With the other eye he watched the cages come up and saw the headmen counting the roll of the gangs. With all his heart and soul he swore at the winder who controlled the iron drum that wound up the wire rope on which hung the cages. In a little time there was a down draw in the water behind the embankment, a sucking whirlpool, all yellow and yeasty. The water had smashed through the skin of the earth and was pouring into the old shallow workings of Twenty-Two. We'll return with At Twenty-Two by Rudyard Kipling right after these sponsor messages.

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Deep down below, a rush of Blackwater caught the last gang waiting for the cage. "'and as they clambered in, the whirl was about their waists. "'The cage reached the pit bank, and the manager called a roll. "'The gangs were all safe except Gang Janky, Gang Mogul, and Gang Ram, "'eighteen men, with perhaps ten basket-women who loaded the coal "'into the little iron carriages that ran on the tramways of the main galleries. "'These gangs were in the outworkings, three-quarters of a mile away, "'on the extreme fringe of the mine. once more the cage went down but with only two englishmen in it and dropped into a swirling roaring current that had almost touched the roof of some of the lower side galleries one of the wooden balks with which they had propped the old workings shot past on the current just missing the cage if we don't want our ribs knocked out we'd better go said the manager we can't even save the company's props the cage drew out of the water with a splash and a few minutes later, it was officially reported that there were at least ten feet of water in the pit's eye. Now ten feet of water there meant that all the other places in the mine were flooded except such galleries as were more than ten feet above the level of the bottom of the shaft. The deep workings would be full, the main galleries would be full, but in the high workings reached by inclines from the main roads, there would be a certain amount of air cut off, so to speak, by the water, and squeezed up by it. The little science primers explain how water behaves when you pour it down test tubes. The flooding of twenty-two was an illustration on a large scale. By the holy grove! What has happened to the air? It was a Santhon gangman of Gang Mogul in No. 9 gallery, and he was driving a six-foot way through the coal. Then there was a rush from the other galleries, and Gang Janky and Gang Rahim stumbled up with their basket-women. Water has come in the mine, they said, and there is no way of getting out. I went down, said Janky, down the slope of my gallery, and I felt the water. There has been no water in the cutting in our time, clambered the women. Why cannot we go away? Be silent, said Janky. Long ago, when my father was here, water came to ten. No, eleven. cutting, and there was great trouble. Let us get away to where the air is better. The three gangs and the basket women left No. 9 gallery and went further up No. 16. At one turn of the road they could see the pitchy black water lapping on the coal. It had touched the roof of a gallery that they knew well, a gallery where they used to smoke their hookahs and manage their flirtations. Seeing this, they called aloud upon their gods, and the Mayas, who were thrice bastard Mohammedans, strove to recollect the name of the prophet. They came to a great open square once nearly all the coal had been extracted. It was the end of the outworkings and the end of the mine. Far away down the gallery a small pumping engine,

used for keeping dry at deep working and fed with stream from above, was throbbing faithfully. They heard it cease. They have cut off the steam, said Kundu, hopefully. They have given the order to use all the steam for the pit-bank pumps. They will clear out the water. If the water has reached the smoking gallery, said Janky, all the company's pumps can do nothing for three days. It is very hot, moaned Jasoda, the Mia basket woman. There is a very bad air here because of the lamps. Put them out, said Janky. Why do you want lamps? The lamps were put out, and the company sat still in the utter dark. Somebody rose quietly and began walking over the coals. It was Janki, who was touching the walls with his hands. Where is the ledge? He murmured to himself. Sit, said Kundu. If we die, we die. The air is very bad. But Janki still stumbled and crept, and tapped with his pick upon the walls. The women rose to their feet. Stay all where you are. Without the lamps you cannot see, and I, I am always seen, said Janki. "'Then he paused and called out, "'Oh, you who have been in the cutting more than ten years, "'what is the name of this open place? "'I am an old man, and I have forgotten.' "'Bully is Womb,' answered the Santhal, "'who had complained of the vileness of the air. "'Again?' said Janky. "'Bully is Womb.' "'Then I have found it. "'The name only had slipped my memory. "'Tibu's Gang's Gallery is here.' "'A lie!' said Kondu. "'There have been no galleries in this place since my day.' "'Three paces was the depth of the ledge,' muttered Janky, without heeding. "'And—oh, my poor bones! "'I have found it. "'It is here, up this ledge. "'Come, all of you, one by one, to the place of my voice, and I will count you.' There was a rush in the dark, and Janky felt the first man's face hit his knees as the Santhal scrambled up the ledge. Who are you? cried Janki. Sudol Manji. Sit you down, said Janki. Who is next? One by one the women and the men crawled up the ledge which ran along one side of Bulia's room. Degraded Mohammedan, pig-eating Musar, and wild Santhal, Janki ran his hand over them all. Now follow after me, said he, catching hold of my heel, "'and the women catching the men's clothes. "'He did not ask whether the men had brought their picks with them. "'A miner, black or white, does not drop his pick. "'One by one, Janky leading, they crept into the old gallery, "'a six-foot way with a scant four feet from hill to roof. "'The air is better here,' said Jesota. "'They could hear her heart beating in thick, sick bumps.

"'Slowly,' said Janky. "'I am an old man, and I forget many things. "'This is Tibu's gallery, but where are the four bricks "'where they used to put their hookah-fire on "'when the sahibs never saw? "'Slowly, slowly. "'Oh, you people behind!' "'They heard his hands disturbing the small coal "'on the floor of the gallery, and then a dull sound. "'This is one unbaked brick, and this is another, and another. "'Cundu is a young man. Let him come forward. "'Put a knee upon this brick, and strike here. When Tibu's gang were at dinner on the last day before the good coal ended, they heard the men of five on the other side, and five worked their gallery two Sundays later. Or it may have been one. Strike there, Kundu, but give me room to go back. Kundu, doubting, drove the pick, but the first soft crush of the coal was a call to him. He was fighting for his life and for Unda, pretty little Unda with rings on all her toes, "'for Unda and the forty rupees. "'The women sang the song of the pick, "'the terrible slow, swinging melody "'with the muttered chorus "'that repeats the sliding of the loosened coal "'and, to each cadence, "'Cundu smote in the black dark. "'When he could do no more, "'Sunu Omanji took the pick "'and struck for his life and his wife "'and his village beyond the blue hills "'over the Terachunda River. "'For an hour the men worked, "'and then the women cleared away the coal. "'It is farther than I thought,' said Janki. The air is very bad, but strike, Kundu, strike hard. For the fifth time, Kundu took up the pick as the santan crawled back. The song had scarcely recommenced when it was broken by a yell from Kundu that echoed down the gallery. Parhua! Parhua! We are through! We are through! The imprisoned air in the mine shot through the opening, and the women at the far end of the gallery heard the water rush through the pillars of Bulia's room and roar against the ledge. "'Having fulfilled the law under which it worked, it rose no further. "'The women screamed to press forward. "'The water has come. We shall be killed. Let us go.' "'Kundu crawled through the gap and found himself in a propped gallery "'by the simple process of hitting his head against a beam. "'Do I know the pits or do I not?' chuckled Janky. "'This is the number five. Go you out slowly. "'Giving me your names. Ho! Rahim! Count your gang!' Now let us go forward, each catching hold of the other as before. They formed a line in the darkness, and John Key led them. For a pitman in a strange pit, it is only one degree less liable to err than an ordinary mortal underground for the first time. At last they saw a flare lamp, and gangs John Key, Mogul, and Rahim, of twenty-two, stumbled dazed into the glare of the drop furnace at the bottom of the five,

John Key feeling his way, and the rest behind. Water has come into 22. God knows where the others are. I have brought these men from Tibu's gallery. in our cutting, making connection to the north side of the gallery. Take us to the cage, said Janky Mia. At the pit bank of twenty-two, some thousand people clamored and wept and shouted. One hundred men, one thousand men, had been drowned in the cutting. They would all go to their homes to-morrow. Where were their men? Her clothing, drenched with the rain, stood at the pit mouth, calling down the shaft for Kundu. They had swung the cages clear of the mouth, and her only answer was the murmur of the flood in the pit's eye two hundred and sixty feet below. "'Look out for that woman! She'll chuck herself down the shaft in a minute!' shouted the manager. But he heed not of troubled. Onda was afraid of death. She wanted Kundu. The assistant was watching the flood and seeing how far he could wade into it. There was a lull in the water, and the whirlpool had slackened. The mine was full, and the people at the pit bank howled. my faith we shall be lucky if we have five hundred hands on the place tomorrow said the manager there's some chance yet of running a temporary dam across that water shoving everything tubs and bullet carts if you're having enough bricks make them work now if they never worked before hi you gangers make them work little by little the crowd was broken into detachments and pushed toward the water with promises of overtime. The dam-making began, and when it was fairly under way, the manager thought that the hour had come for the pumps. There was no fresh inrush into the mine. The tall, red, iron-clamped pump beam rose and fell, and the pumps snored and guttered and shrieked as the first water poured out of the pipe. "'We must run her all to-night,' said the manager wearily. "'But there's no hope for the poor devils down below.' Look here, Gur-Sahi. If you are proud of your engines, show me what they can do now. Gur-Sahi grinned and nodded, with his right hand upon the lever and an oil can on his left. He could do no more than he was doing, but he could keep that up till the dawn. Were the company's pumps to be beaten by the vagaries of that troublesome Terachunda River? Never. And the pumps sobbed and panted, never, never. The manager sat in the shelter of the pit-bank roofing, trying to dry himself by the pump-boiler fire, and in the dreary dusk he saw the crowds of the dam scatter and fly. That's the end, he groaned. It will take us six weeks to persuade him that we haven't tried to drown their mates on purpose. Oh, for a decent, rational Gordy! But the flight had no panic in it. Men had run over from five with astounding news, and the foremen could not hold their gangs together.

Presently, surrounded by a clamorous crew, gangs Rahim, Mogul, and Janki, and ten basket women, walked up to report themselves, and pretty little Unda stole away to Janki's hut to prepare his evening meal. Alone I found the way, exclaimed Janki Mia, and now will the company give me pension? The simple pit folks shouted and leaped and went back to the dam, reassured in their own belief that, whatever happened, so great was the power of the company whose salt they ate. None of them could be killed. But Gur Sahih only bared his white teeth and kept his hand upon the lever and proved his pumps to the uttermost. "'I say,' said the assistant to the manager a week later, "'do you recollect, Germinal?' "'Yes, queer thing. I thought of it in the cage when that wood went by. Why? "'Oh, this business seems to be upside down. "'Jonky was in my veranda all this morning, "'telling me that Kundu had eloped with his wife, "'Unda, or Anda, I think her name was. "'Hallo! "'And those were the cattle that you risk your life to clear out of twenty-two?' "'No. I was thinking of the company's props, not the company's men. "'Sounds better to say so now. But I don't believe you, old fellow.'" At the end, Kipling's At Twenty-Two leaves us with the truth Kipling understood better than most, that the world's harshest places often reveal its clearest wisdom. Deep underground, where sight is useless and fear is close enough to touch, it wasn't youth, strength, or authority that saved those miners. It was the stubborn, half-forgotten knowledge of an old blind man who refused to surrender what the darkness had taught him. Junkie Mia is one of Kipling's most quietly remarkable characters. He's flawed, selfish, proud, and sometimes foolish. Yet when the mind turns deadly, he becomes the one who can navigate its buried history, not through maps or measurements, but through memory, instinct, and the intimate feel of the earth itself. Kipley reminds us that experience even when wrapped in eccentricity has a value that cannot be replaced by youth or my an expertise. And then, in true Kipling fashion, the story ends not with triumph, but with irony. John Key emerges from the mine a hero, only to discover that life above ground has betrayed him in a way the mine never did. The flood may have spared him, but human nature, restless, impulsive, and opportunistic, delivers its own blow. The final twist is what gives At-22 its lasting resonance. It's a story about survival, but also about the limits of control. About how a man can master the darkness beneath the earth, yet remain vulnerable to the shadows in his own home. Kipling leaves us with a portrait of courage tinsed with melancholy, and a reminder that even the greatest victories don't always protect us from the small, personal losses that shape a life.

Thanks for joining us at 1001 Classic Short Stories and Tales. This is your host, John Hagedorn. We do appreciate reviews very much. Until next time, take care, and we'll be back soon.

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