While hot fires were roaring in the great furnaces, smoke rose from the
dusty beds where Titanic castings were cooling. Great cranes, manacled
with heavy chains, stood over the furnace-doors, ready to lift steaming
jorums of melted metal, and pour out, hot and hot, for the moulds to
swallow.

Raw material in big heaps lay about, waiting for the fire to ripen it.
Here was a stack of long, rough, rusty pigs, clumsy as the shillelabs of
the Anakim. There was a pile of short, thick masses, lying
higgledy-piggledy, stuff from the neighboring mines, which needed to be
crossed with foreign stock before it could be of much use in civilization.

Here, too, was raw material organized: a fly-wheel, large enough to keep
the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head,
cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going steamer breast the
waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the
river; and other members of machines, only asking to be put together and
vivified by steam and they would go at their work with a will.

From the black rafters overhead hung the heavy folds of a dim atmosphere,
half dust, half smoke. A dozen sunbeams, forcing their way through the
grimy panes of the grimy upper windows, found this compound quite palpable
and solid, and they moulded out of it a series of golden bars set side by
side aloft, like the pipes of an organ out of its perpendicular.

Wade grew indignant, as he looked about him and saw so much good stuff and
good force wasting for want of a little will and skill to train the force
and manage the stuff. He abhorred bankruptcy and chaos.