hammering below. "Take me down there," she commanded.

He led the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn
logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the
stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous
gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling,
white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated
with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals a
flushing rod was withdrawn from a fire and plunged in a trough of water;
a cloud of ghostly steam arose, a forgeman's visage momentarily
illuminated like a copper mask. A grimy lantern was hung above the
anvil, its thin light falling on the ponderous head of the trip hammer
suspended at right angles from a turning cogged shaft projection through
the wall.

The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an
obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat,
drum bellows. The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies,
herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with
hooked bars. An incandescent mass was lifted, born, rayed in an
intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and,
as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the
blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks
dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The
hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like
gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals,
heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.
The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.
The hammering continued.