In the next process steel ingots are made.  I lost track of the exact detail of this, but I remember seeing the ingots riding about in their own steel cars, turning to an orange color as they cooled, and I remember seeing them pounded by a hammer that stood up in the air like an elevated railroad station, and I know that pretty soon they got into the blooming mill and were rolled out into “blooms,” after which they were handled by a huge contrivance like a thumb and forefinger of steel which—­though the blooms weigh five tons apiece—­picked them up much as you might pick up a stick of red candy.

Still orange-hot, the blooms find their way to the rolling mill, where they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers—­the latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing rails; after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool.  And I may add that, while there is more brilliant heat to be seen in many other departments of the plant, there is no department in which the color is more beautiful than in the piles of rails on the cooling beds—­some of them still red as they come from the rollers, others shading off to rose and pink, and finally to their normal cold steel-gray.

Presently along comes a great electromagnet; from somewhere in the sky it drops down and touches the rails; when it rises bunches of them rise with it, and, after sailing through the air, are gently deposited upon flat cars.  Here, even after the current is shut off, some of them may try to stick to the magnet, as though fearing to go forth into the world.  If so, it gives them a little shake, whereupon they let go, and it travels back to get more rails and load them on the cars.

Iron ore, coal, and limestone, the three chief materials used in the making of steel, are all found in the hills in the immediate vicinity of Birmingham.  I am told that there is no other place in the world where the three exist so close together.  That is an impressive fact, but one grows so accustomed to impressive facts, while passing through this plant, that one ceases to be impressed, becoming merely dazed.

If I were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—­things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—­but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent absence of men.