Think on it now, it’s a deep thing, and dark as a pit.
– Arthur Miller
The Crucible, Act 1. Giles Corey is talking about how people in Salem are not getting along with one another and suing their neighbors at an alarming rate. He himself confesses to being in court six times that year. Using a simile, he warns how people’s greed and hunger for vengeance are pulling them down into a black pit. This is foreshadowing of how the Salem community will be swallowed up by its own dark pit of destruction and Putitan intolerance, leading to many innocent lives being destroyed in the infamous witch trials.