COPIAPÓ, Chile — In the days before he was rescued, Mario Gómez had reached a breaking point.

Though he was the oldest and possibly the most experienced of the 33 miners trapped nearly a half mile underground, he began to “feel strong explosions” in the shafts surrounding him, his sister said, and started panicking that another cave-in like the one that had hemmed them in two months earlier was imminent.

“He said, ‘They needed to get us out right away,’ ” his sister, Eva Gómez, 61, recounted him as saying after his rescue.

“ ‘They were taking too long,’ ” he told her.

When he finally surfaced on Wednesday, he dropped to the ground in prayer. His wife, who had been saying for weeks that she wanted Mr. Gómez to retire, reached down and lifted him up from his knees before he was hospitalized with pneumonia.

As the miners were rescued in a pageant that moved their worldwide audience — watching on television, computers, even cellphones — to tears and laughter, glimpses of their personalities, their struggles to maintain their spirits during their subterranean ordeal and even the life that awaited them back on the surface began to emerge as well.