assisted at the operation. In front of them was a piece of
artillery ready to give fire on the signal from the engineer.
Some minutes before midday the first driblets of metal began to
flow; the reservoirs filled little by little; and, by the time
that the whole melting was completely accomplished, it was kept
in abeyance for a few minutes in order to facilitate the
separation of foreign substances.

Twelve o'clock struck! A gunshot suddenly pealed forth and shot
its flame into the air. Twelve hundred melting-troughs were
simultaneously opened and twelve hundred fiery serpents crept
toward the central well, unrolling their incandescent curves.
There, down they plunged with a terrific noise into a depth of
900 feet. It was an exciting and a magnificent spectacle.
The ground trembled, while these molten waves, launching into the
sky their wreaths of smoke, evaporated the moisture of the mould
and hurled it upward through the vent-holes of the stone lining
in the form of dense vapor-clouds. These artificial clouds
unrolled their thick spirals to a height of 1,000 yards into
the air. A savage, wandering somewhere beyond the limits of the
horizon, might have believed that some new crater was forming in
the bosom of Florida, although there was neither any eruption,
nor typhoon, nor storm, nor struggle of the elements, nor any of
those terrible phenomena which nature is capable of producing.
No, it was man alone who had produced these reddish vapors,
these gigantic flames worthy of a volcano itself, these
tremendous vibrations resembling the shock of an earthquake,
these reverberations rivaling those of hurricanes and storms;
and it was his hand which precipitated into an abyss, dug by
himself, a whole Niagara of molten metal!