"But if the crucible were to burst——"
"That did happen once to me: it was in 1399, while I was experimenting with Nicolas Flamel, in his house by St. Jacques' in the Shambles. Poor Nick almost lost his life, and I lost twenty-seven marks' worth of a substance more precious than gold."
"What the deuse are you telling me? that you were pursuing the great work in 1399 with Nicolas Flamel?"
"Yes, Flamel and I found the way while together fifty or sixty years before, working with Pietro the Good, in Pela town. He did not pour out the crucible quickly enough, and I had a bad eye, the left one, for ten or twelve years, from the steam. Of course you know Pietro's book, the famous 'Margarita Pretiosa,' dated 1330?"
"To be sure; and you knew Flamel and Peter the Good?"
"I was the pupil of one and the master of the other."
While the alarmed prelate, wondered whether this might not be the Prince of Darkness himself and not one of his imps by his side, Balsamo plunged his tongs into the incandescence.
It was a sure and rapid seizure. He nipped the crucible four inches beneath the rim, testing the grip by lifting it just a couple of inches. Then, by a vigorous effort, straining his muscles, he raised the frightful pot from the scorching bed. The tongs reddened almost up to the grasp. On the superheated surface white streaks ran like lightning in a sulphurous cloud. The pot edges deepened into brick red, then browner, while its conical shape appeared rosy and silvery in the twilight of the recess. Finally the molten metal could be spied, forming a violet cream on the top, with golden shivers, which hissed out of the lips of the container, and leaped flaming into the black mold. At its orifice reappeared the gold, spouting up furious and fuming, as if insulted by the vile metal which confined it.
Balsamo, passing to the second mold, which he filled with the same skill and strength.