ack depths of the ladle. Vapours of green and sulphur
and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.
Polder called a warning into Mariana's ear, they drew back as a lump of
coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle. A dull vermilion blaze
followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation--"recarburizing."
He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container. Men,
Polder said shortly, had fallen in.... Utterly unthinkable. With a
sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on
the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second
receptacle below. That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools
widened across the riven ground. The steel itself escaped in a milky
incandescence. "A wild heat," James Polder told them, pleased. "The
bottom of a furnace may drop out. I was almost caught in the pit at
Cambria." The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten
metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular
group of moulds. There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central
pipe. "Bottom-filled," Polder concluded, assisting Mariana over the
precarious flooring; "the metal rises into the ingot forms."

They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the
superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the
boardwalk. They passed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous
crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a
system of rollers through a black, dripping compression. "I can take you
to the Senate," James Polder told them, once more outside; "or the
Engineers' Society. Dinner will be ready at the club."

He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly
constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club. The dining
room was already filling but they secured a small table against the
wall. Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle.
Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority
in their manner, pronouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with
immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden
gravity of thought, silent calculation. He saw the smooth, deft hands of
draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder's, had
laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.

He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed. He