With six stages going all the time, Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Virginia City business was important and lucrative.
All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some of New York's streets.

I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.
Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.

Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart.

These timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom.

It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton.