The iron seemed to be a living organism; it
became a fluid, moved, and seemed to shape itself intelligently after
every fashion, to obey the worker's every caprice. Through the uproar
made by the bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the
shrill sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael
passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able to inspect
at his leisure the great press that Planchette had told him about. He
admired the cast-iron beams, as one might call them, and the twin bars
of steel coupled together with indestructible bolts.

"If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," said Spieghalter,
pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you would make a steel bar spurt
out in thousands of jets, that would get into your legs like needles."

"The deuce!" exclaimed Raphael.

Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the metal plates
of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the certainty of a scientific
conviction, he worked the crank energetically.

"Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!" thundered Spieghalter, as he
himself fell prone on the floor.

A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. The water in
the machine had broken the chamber, and now spouted out in a jet of
incalculable force; luckily it went in the direction of an old furnace,
which was overthrown, enveloped and carried away by a waterspout.

"Ha!" remarked Planchette serenely, "the piece of skin is as safe and
sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your reservoir somewhere, or a
crevice in the large tube----"

"No, no; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your contrivance, sir; you
can take it away," and the German pounced upon a smith's hammer, flung
the skin down on an anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives,
dealt the talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded
through his workshops.

"There is not so much as a mark on it!" said Planchette, stroking the
perverse bit of skin.

The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and buried it in the
glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semi-circle round the fire, they
all awaited the action of a huge pair of bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter,
and Professor Planchette stood in the midst of the grimy expectant
crowd. Raphael, looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings,
white eyes, greasy blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could have
fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal world