He would have
on his return to put on his own again and leave these others behind.
Thus smuggling was impossible.
The first room was for the smelting.
Here there was nothing to be seen of the blazing fire which illuminated
the dark hollow through the windows, in one corner of the room was a
simple cylinder shaped iron furnace which radiated a burning heat, on
the top of which stood a round graphite crucible covered in at the top
and provided with a lateral pipe.
"Here the gold is remelted after it has come out of the purifying oven,"
said Fatia Negra to the girl who pressed close up to him. "Heretofore it
required a whole apparatus of boilers and loads and loads of wood to
bring it to smelting heat, but since I got that cylinder-stove, ten
hundredweights of metal can be melted in ten minutes."
"But where does the fire come from?" enquired the girl.
"From the earth, my beloved."
The girl shrank back with horror, and yet Fatia Negra did not mean hell
but that furnace whose powerful bellows drove the melting heat into the
double cylinder.
He looked at his watch, the moment had come. At a single whistle a
couple of workmen appeared, each of them stripped to the waist on
account of the great heat; they held in their hands large iron moulds
and stood facing each other opposite the crucible. Then by means of an
iron tap Fatia Negra turned the pipe of the crucible and immediately a
pale glare began to spread through the room--the liquid gold ran in a
thin jet out of the crucible and that was the cause of the light.
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