d distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps to
Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile
impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words they passed
into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them now: a
weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of the
furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres came into it, some fifty
yards up--a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam rose up
from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping damply about
them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the black and red
eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The shining black tower
of the larger blast-furnace rose overhead out of the mist, and its
tumultuous riot filled their ears. Raut kept away from the edge of the
water, and watched Horrocks.

"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as sin;
but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives across
the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death."

Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his watch
on Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The
threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little
reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about "white
as death" and "red as sin"? Coincidence, perhaps?

They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then
through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate
steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black,
half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between
the wheels, "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear; and they went and
peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the
tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye
blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across the
dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and lime
were raised to the top of the big cylinder.

And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace Raut's doubts came
upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did know--everything!
Do what he would, he could not resist a violent trembling. Right under
foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a dangerous place. They
pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing that crowned the thing.
The re