The Confusion

Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.

Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.

All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.

The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.

“I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”

“Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”

“No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”

“We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”

“Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire-they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is-that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”

The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”

They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking pot-shards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.

A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them-these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.