In 1936, George Orwell visited a coal mine in Grimethorpe, England. "The place is like... my own mental picture of hell," he wrote of the experience. "Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space." Orwell was a lanky guy, 6'3" or 6'2", and I am too, so I was reminded of his comparison recently while crawling through a tunnel as dank and dark as a medieval sewer, nearly a mile underground in one of the oldest active mines in Latin America, the Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia. The chutes were so narrow that I couldn't have turned around—or turned back—even if I'd wanted to.
