The Confusion

After a while the stench dissipated, and not long after that, steam began to rise. Presently the kettle came to a galloping boil, and they found that they could approach. The Breath of Ammon had all been expelled. But this was not the last time they smelled it, for the kettle had not been capacious enough to hold all the urine they had collected, and much remained strewn about the compound in diverse small containers. As the level of the boiling brew fell, they dumped in more urine to top it off again, and each time they did, it let off another scream of Ammon-breath. This went on for much of the day; but finally the last chamber-pot had been emptied and tossed into the street. A few minutes later the stench of sal ammoniac abated for good. There followed an interlude of some hours during which the kettle merely boiled, and threw off a column of steam that rose high over Diu and drifted away into the blue sky over the sea. Jack, peering in over the kettle’s rim, saw it boiled down to a small fraction of its former volume, and glimpsed just beneath the foaming surface a churning mass of solid yellow-brown stuff. From time to time he reached into it with a paddle, checking its consistency as he had seen Enoch Root do. When it became difficult to stir, he called for charcoal. The mass was stained with black as sacks of the stuff, ground up to the consistency of meal, were dumped in. Jack stirred until the mix was gray, and so dry and thick that the paddle nearly became lodged in it. Moisture was still condensing on his brow, but he knew all the water was nearly gone now, and they must work quickly. The others knew as much as Jack did, having been in on the trial batch that had taken Padraig’s eye. So when Jack jumped back from the kettle’s rim they did not need to be told what to do: pulling on lines and pushing with sticks, they maneuvered over the kettle’s rim an upside-down funnel of the same diameter, and set it down so that the two were joined in an open-mouth kiss, and packed oakum and dribbled tar around the junction so that no fume could escape. All of the vapors emanating from the hot gray mass in the bottom of the kettle were now channeled up into the copper dunce-cap, which had but one outlet: a copper chimney that bent round to the side and developed into a snergly tube, terminated by a U-bend that led into the bottom of the smaller vessel-the bubbler-with the glass port-hole in its side. This was filled with water, as anyone who looked at the window could see. It was two fathoms above the ground, and they had erected a scaffold and a platform of bamboo so that they could work there.

When Jack was satisfied with the progress of the caulking and sealing of the great dunce-cap, he ascended the platform-a tinker’s shop and an apothecary-store of ladles, funnels, bottles, and terra-cotta vessels of clove-oil-and was pleased to observe a slight rise in the water-level, followed by a blurp and a collapse as some residual steam forced its way through the water-trap in the U-bend. This happened several more times in the next few minutes as the very last of the moisture was exhaled from the humid cake in the kettle, but then it stopped. There was then an interlude, which grew awkward the longer it went on; but Jack bid them keep stoking the fire and have faith. He was viewing the water level with respect to a wee bubble trapped in the glass pane, and for a while it did not move at all. But then it rose up distinctly, and a moment later a little belch of vapor shimmered up through the water and broke out the top. “It begins!” he announced.