Around the idol
iron stairs led up and ended in a circular gallery.

When Pratteler stepped up to the monster he scanned it with a quick and
hostile glance. For a moment he stopped short and felt disinclined to
grapple with it. Then he approached with determination, gritting his
teeth as if it were an enemy. After an hour he was familiar with all
its secrets. He learned that it was a rather simple idol. Yet its
gigantic proportions again and again impressed him, and he could not
understand how Hoeflinger treated it so familiarly and had never
mentioned it to him the day before. Nor had he said anything about the
masses of workingmen who were here working for the profit of others and
among belt-gearings and cables and rows of steel beasts of all sizes
and forms were day and night risking their lives. Those workingmen,
too, moved about in a self-contained and indifferent manner. They
crouched silently behind their machines, carried burdens, spat at
intervals, and did not seem to mind that the foremen watched them and
the engineers ordered them about. Pratteler hated all foremen, feared
the machines with a dangerous destructive fear, and thought the
engineers tyrants like Gessler, every man of them deserving to be the
aim of a new Tell. They played at being masters, scorned the
proletariat, and worked for the profit of the capitalists who paid
them.

At noon other masses appeared in the factory courts: the wives and
children of the laborers brought the lunch. They waited at the places
assigned them until the siren blew. Then the workingmen rapidly left
the shops and crowded toward their kin, unless they had brought their
food in the well-known blue dinner-pails that were waiting for them on
the stoves in the heating-rooms. Such herd-like movements annoyed
Pratteler's individual and democratic sense and offended his good old
journeyman traditions. Unwillingly he followed Hoeflinger into the third
factory court where Spiele stood beside her wheel. Hoeflinger had
invented a special arrangement for fastening the lunch-basket to the
wheel. Thus he could enjoy a freshly cooked meal while the others had
to be satisfied with the taste of warmed-up food, and he also had the
satisfaction of spending a minimum of time and strength upon what was a
necessity. Only in bad weather did the two ride home; but that made the
long one lose his noon-hour nap which he never failed to take after
lunch in one of the factory sheds.

Pratteler