The air was torn, shattered, upheaved, compressed, pierced through, by sounds of shock, strain, impact, clangor, cannonade and shrill whistle blasts, occurring in any order of sequence, and then all at one time dissolving in a moment of vast silence even more amazing to the ear. Conversation would be possible only by shrieks close up. The men seemed never to speak at their work. They did not communicate ideas by signs either. Each man had his place, his part, his own pattern of action, and did what he did with a kind of mechanical inevitability, as if it were something he had never learned. They were related not to each other but to the process, kept their eyes fixedly on it for obvious reasons, and stepped warily. A false gesture might have immediate consequences.
The process just then was that of rolling iron bars. From where Breakspeare stood he saw the latter end of it. He saw the finished bars spurt like dull red serpents from between the rolls. Two men standing with their gaze on the running hole from which the reptile darted forth snared it by the neck with tongs, walked slowly backward with it as the rolls released the glowing body, until its tail came free; then dragged it off, a tame, limp thing, turning black, and put it straight along with others to cool.
The whole process could not be seen at once. It took place in a train of events covering many acres of area. It could be followed backward,—that is by going from the finished bars to the source of the iron, or in the other direction downstream, from the puddling furnaces where the iron is cooked, to the hammermen who mauled it into rough shape and thence to the rolls. Breakspeare, having started that way, traced it backward, from the finished bar to the source of its becoming.
He moved to a position from which he could see all that happened at the rolls.
The rolls were merely enormous cylinders revolving together in gears, with grooves through which to pass the malleable iron. The first groove through which it passed was very large, the next one smaller, the next one smaller still, until the last, out of which the final form appeared. The iron had to be passed back and forth through each of these grooves in turn.
On each side of the rolls stood men in pairs with tongs,—silent, foreboding men, with masks on their faces and leather aprons on their feet, singularly impassive and still, save in moments of action. At intervals of two or three minutes a man came running with two hundred weight of incandescent iron in the shape of a rough log five or six feet long, held in tongs swung by a chain to an overhead rail, and dropped it at the feet of the rollers. Becoming that instant alive, the rollers picked it up with tongs, passed it through the first groove of the rolls, giving it a handful of sand if it stuck, and then stood again in that attitude of brooding immobility, leaning on their tongs, looking at nothing, bathed in sparks as the tail of the iron disappeared. On the other side of the rolls similar men with similar tongs seized it as you would take a reptile by the neck in a cleft stick, controlled and guided its wrigglings, turned and thrust its head into the next smaller groove. Thus they passed and repassed it through the rolls, catching it each time by the neck and returning it through a smaller groove. Each time it was longer, more sinuous, less dangerous, until at last, with the final pass, it became what Breakspeare had first seen, namely, a finished wrought iron bar, ready to cool.
From the rolls he moved to the tilthammers. At corresponding intervals the hammermen received on tongs from the puddling furnace two hundred weight of iron in the form of a flaming dough ball, laid it on a block, turned it under the blows of the tilthammer falling like a pile driver from above, until it was the shape of a log, fit to be passed through the rolls. Then helpers, lifting it in tongs, ran with it to the rollers.
Beyond the tilthammers were the puddling furnaces. There the process began.
A puddling furnace is a long, narrow, maw-like chamber of brick and fire clay with a depressed floor for the molten iron to lie in and a small square door at the end. It is heated to inferno by a cataract of flame rising from a fire pit at one side and sucked by draught across the roof of its mouth. When the whole interior is like a dragon’s gullet, white hot, wicked and devouring, cold pigs of iron are cast in, the door is banged to, the chinks are stopped and the puddler gathers up his strength.
In the door is a small round hole. Through that hole the puddler watches. When the iron is fluid his work begins. The thing he represents is Satan raking hell. With his beater and working only through that little round hole, he must stir, whip, knead and skim the iron. The impurities drain away in a lava stream beneath the door. He may not pause. The beater gets too hot to hold, or begins itself to melt. He casts it into a vat of water and continues with another.