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Old miners  

of ore

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My guides were two of the miners who were well adapted to hunt bats in the intense gloom of these depths. One was an old grizzled fellow with an enormous goiter under his chins, and the other had a powerful rounded back and shoulders, with head set forward by long bearing burdens of ore up through these tortuous ways His face was of repulsing paleness & his dead fishy eyes looked out from a [[strikethrough]] fa [[/strikethrough]] countenance like that of a corpse.

He burrowed among the timbers & secured a number of the vampires in his hands each time the vicious brutes bit a piece of skin off so that his hands were streaming with blood. The female bats had each a single young one clinging to her attached to the teat on one side with their bodies stretched across the body of the mother & holding on firmly to the fur on the other side under her wing by means of their hind claws. When pulled off they searched for something to cling to & grasped a finger or other object & clung to it instinctively. Even when quite small they squeaked & bit viciously when handled.