SATURDAY, APRIL 30 Miners ride underground train to distant rock face Town Below Nine Hundred Miles of Roads Snake Through The Porcupine's Rock BY GREG REYNOLDS AR below the streets of Northern Ontario's gold camp, The Porcupine, is another "town" bustling with acti- vity. Here, day and night, thousands of men snake their way through 900 miles of roads and streets in a second world where the strongest rays of the sun never penetrate. Underground is a strange and fascinating place; a miner spends one-third of his life beneath the earth's crust and he is a member of the elite of any mining centre. When asked where he works, he never says, "in a mine," but replies with pride, "underground." On the job, 'he has no worries about the weather-- the temperature never varies by more than a few degrees from year to year in any one spot. The lamp on his steel helmet or the naked bulb hung on rocky outcrop is his sun or moon. It dcesn't rain down there, but water is still a problem. Either there is too much, from natural seepage, or, not enough is coming from the pumps above. It is one of the ironies of mining that the water found underground cannot be used for most purposes. Fresh water must be obtained elsewhere. In his all-male community below, the hard rock miner faces problems similar to those arising in an ordinary town. Smog is an above-ground irritation, but underground the menace is dust. Lights control traffic on streets above, but none stop the thundering ore trains below -- it's move or else. Bridges span rivers and gullies, but mere planks stand between a miner and dizzy drops. Supply is a big problem, for, like the services keeping the towns and settlements humming above, the lack of one can bring the mightiest of mines to a halt. Under- ground, men co-operate, all day, every day, for their liveli- hood; their lives depend on each other. In removing $1,294,576,041 worth of gold from the rock, the 11 producing mines of The Porcupine Camp have turned the whole area into a huge honeycomb. A large part of the Hollinger Gold Mine's operations is carried on beneath the 28,000 people of Timmins. Mc- Intyre, the other giant of the Camp, has extracted its ore from the rocky foundation of Schumacher for decades. Just as there is every kind of street on the surface, underground has tunnels of every description. Near the shafts, there are the "super highways", wide, high and Underground machine shop clean. They have concrete floors, iron-plated walls and screened lights. Pushing on, the roof closes in, the walls narrow and the floor returns to natural rock. The light bulbs become further apart and the rule forcing everyone who goes down the shaft to wear a helmet light begins to make sense. In the older parts of any mine there are no bulbs and the helmet light is like a flickering match at midnight. The rock claims a yearly toll of three to four lives, but the bloody pages of The Porcupine's history are all behind it now. Such pages as the Hollinger fire of '29 which killed 39 and the broken cage cable at the Pay- master in '45 which killed 16 are too well rememberd for past mistakes to occur again. This is the 50th anniversary of the Hollinger and in that time, The Porcupine Camp has earned itself two titles: oldest and richest in the Americas. No other gold mining centre has been in production as long and no other, from the Argentine to Alaska, has produced as much. § land crippling conditions. PAGE ELEVEN Now ! Enjoy A Heat Bath in Your Own Home Therma-Bath is an exciting new concept of controlled heat-bathing. It lets you control your weight and figure, helps cleanse your skin to sparkling freshness, enables you, to luxuriate in the Yension-relieving effects of a Finnish steam-bath. 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