Page:Our Girls.pdf/21

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
AT WOOLWICH
15

sense of silent, irresistible, oceanic, almost motionless power has left you breathless.

After another few minutes you are in the smelting houses. Here are lines of furnaces, some locked, but with gleams of imprisoned fire looking out at you from the interstices of the shutters like ferocious eyes; some open and pouring out liquid metal into moulds in blue and yellow flame. Then there are huge ovens, from whose glittering depths, lit as by thousands of electric lamps, long ribbons of red-hot steel are being drawn at the ends of pincers by half-stripped men with the sweat pouring down their blackened faces. Then smithies, where shells in their earliest processes are being shaped, under fire and hammer, from rough blocks of metal into round things with noses, and flung off from the cranes of anvils to roll away and cool. And then underground pits of fire from which sinuous tongues of many-coloured flame are escaping into the air—reminding you, if you have travelled so far, of the boiling solfataras on the breast