In the video, more than half of the men are stripped down to their underwear. They start to chant, “Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le, mineros de Chile!” They laugh and cheer, and pass around a plastic bottle filled with dirty water as if it were champagne. Sepúlveda throws up his hands and waves them in the aggressive, pleading gesture that Chilean men make at soccer matches. Vega wraps his arm around Sepúlveda, and the entire group launches into the national anthem. As they begin to sing, they shout the words, but by the time they get to the third repetition of the final line their voices sound faint, and the song peters out.

News of the breakthrough quickly spread among the family members in what had become known as Camp Esperanza, but they were separated by several layers of security from the drill site. A crew slowly raised the bit, removing the hundred and fourteen steel tubes that linked the bit to the machine on the surface, one after another, a process that stretched into the afternoon. Finally, the last tube emerged from the shaft, covered in mud. The drillers cleaned off the muck, revealing a clear red mark on the metal. A single, palm-size smudge had survived the journey to the top. “Was that there before?” Laurence Golborne, Chile’s Minister of Mining, asked. “No!” the drillers responded excitedly. Golborne could see that there was something wrapped around the drill bit, and he began to remove it. It was a piece of rubber tubing, and underneath it he could see scraps of paper. Of the dozen or more notes that the men had attached to the drill assembly, two had survived.

Golborne began to read the first one out loud: “The drill broke through at Level 94, at three metres from the front. On one side of the roof, close to the right wall. Some water is falling. We are in the Refuge. Drills have passed behind us.” Part of the note was torn off. It ended with “May God illuminate you. A saludo to Clara and my family. Mario Gómez.”

Someone began to read the second note: “Dear Lila. I am well, thank God. I hope to see you soon.”

“It’s a personal letter,” another person said. “We should save it.”

Meanwhile, one of the roustabout members of the drilling crew had nudged the piece of rubber tubing, which had fallen to the ground. The driller figured he’d pick it up as a souvenir, but when he took a closer look he noticed that there was something inside. “It’s another note!” someone yelled. Golborne opened the third message, written on a folded piece of graph paper: “We are well in the Refuge. The 33.”

Even before Golborne could announce what it said, those nearby had caught glimpses of the note and screamed out in joy: “They’re alive! All those bastards!” The workers cheered and embraced. One of the drillers fell to his knees. Some sobbed, in the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born.

Several drillers ran down toward the tents of Camp Esperanza, which was dotted with media trucks and Catholic shrines. There were fires made by families keeping round-the-clock vigils. The drillers shouted that the miners were alive.

The three-inch-wide tube linking the interior of the mine to the rescuers on the surface allowed a probe to descend with a video camera. It captured the first images of the trapped men seen by the outside world—the haunting eyes of Luis Urzúa. Next came a telephone receiver. Edison Peña took the earpiece and listened as it filled with the robust, hopeful voices of people on the surface. There was a man saying that he was the Minister of Mining, and other voices, too. “I could hear this collection of people,” Peña recalled. “And I heard this very firm voice. . . . I broke down. I just wasn’t capable of speaking.”

After several hours, vials of glucose gel were lowered to the men through the plastic tube. In the days that followed, small amounts of protein drinks and fresh water were lowered to them, and then cereal and fruit in gradually increasing portions, as the Chilean medical staff heeded the advice of NASA scientists to “go low and slow” in feeding the miners.

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As the men gained strength, they began to suffer urine retention and a skin condition caused by fungi spreading inside the humid petri dish that the mine had become. To get the men out, the rescuers began drilling a twenty-eight-inch-wide shaft directed at a passageway near the mechanics’ workshop, but told them that they might have to wait until Christmas, some four months longer, to be rescued.

“Now I know how an animal in captivity feels, always depending on a human hand to feed it,” Victor Segovia wrote in his diary.

The mountain’s intermittent roars and wails reminded the men that the mine was still destroying itself, and that another collapse could kill them before the rescue shaft was ready. They also learned from newspapers and a palm-size television projector that had been lowered down to them that they had become worldwide celebrities.

“Buenos Días a Todos,” a morning show broadcast from Santiago, said that the government of the Dominican Republic had offered to fly all of them and their families to resorts there. “It was surreal,” Urzúa said later. “But after a while surreal things like that started to seem normal.”

A Chilean mining executive gave the equivalent of about ten thousand dollars to each man’s family, and urged the country to raise an additional million dollars for each of them. Offers of money for interviews and endorsements reached their family members. The men’s sudden wealth, and their growing fame, led many to bicker. Sepúlveda wrote to his son, describing himself as the group’s “absolute leader.” When the letter was leaked to the press, the miners split into pro- and anti-Sepúlveda camps. For the first time, the men began to fight about religion, and attendance at the daily prayers dropped off.

Sepúlveda said he could see the “insect” of greed and vanity destroying the brotherhood. Sin had filtered down from the surface, so on his thirty-seventh day underground he descended into the mountain to pray in a cavern at Level 44. “Have pity on us, and make us as we were before,” he said. At that moment, Sepúlveda said, he felt the presence of something evil. When he returned to the Refuge, he was covered in mud, as if he’d been in a wrestling match.

What happened to you? his fellow-miners asked.

“I was fighting the Devil,” Sepúlveda said.

A miners’ legend has it that Satan lives in gold mines. On the morning of their sixty-seventh day, the mountain began to rumble with explosions nearly as loud as those on the day of the collapse. The drilling of the rescue shaft had just been completed, after four weeks, and the rescue was scheduled to begin in three days; several of the men believed that the Devil was making one last effort to keep them inside.

In frantic phone calls to the surface, they begged the rescuers to begin bringing them out immediately. Word came back that they had to wait, while a winching device was prepared. Finally, on October 12, 2010, sixty-nine days after the collapse, the rescuers lowered a steel cylinder capsule, dubbed the Phoenix, into the shaft. Just before midnight, Florencio Ávalos, the foreman, got in it. The leaders of the rescue had decided that a younger and stronger man should go first, in case problems arose. A billion people watched his ascent, live, on TV. Alone in the capsule, Ávalos remembered the events of the past ten weeks, and his wedding day, and the births of his sons. The heat and humidity inside the shaft began to diminish as Ávalos rose. When the capsule neared the surface, after a quarter of an hour, he felt the cool breeze of a spring night flowing over him.