“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 place.  The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapor streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of Hanley quiver.  The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds, halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle.  The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge, and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields towards Burslem.

“That’s the cone I’ve been telling you of,” shouted Horrocks; “and, below that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water.”

Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone.  The heat was intense.  The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks’ voice.  But the thing had to be gone through now.  Perhaps, after all . . .

“In the middle,” bawled Horrocks, “temperature near a thousand degrees.  If you were dropped into it . . . . flash into flame like a pinch of gunpowder in a candle.  Put your hand out and feel the heat of his breath.  Why, even up here I’ve seen the rain-water boiling off the trucks.  And that cone there.  It’s a damned sight too hot for roasting cakes.  The top side of it’s three hundred degrees.”

“Three hundred degrees!” said Raut.