Their striped suits, red-blotched with iron rust, were tattered; their heavy brogans gaped where molten drippings had burned away the leather. Some limped from burns, and some bore on hands and faces ugly sores—the marks of spattered liquid iron. They were savagely reckless at their work, and the guards had to watch them closely lest they maim themselves. They sweated in torment and strange wordless feuds existed among them; stealthy blows were struck without cause.
The moulding room was long and low, earth-floored, dusky with shadows at noonday. On the earth floor, in rows flanking path-wide intervals, lay the moulds—wooden frames about which was tamped black sand. Walls and roof were of corrugated iron. The naked rafters overhead were crusted with dirt; black dirt lay in thin layers on the window-panes and hung in cobwebbed festoons from the bars. At one end of the room, looming tall into the shadows until it became itself a shadow among them, stood the cylindrical furnace, gloomy when dead, and
