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"Do you see those long rows of bee-hives? Those are ovens in which soft coal is being burned so that a certain ingredient called bitumen may be driven off from it. What is left after that is done is a substance that looks somewhat like a dry, sponge if that were gray and hard. It burns with a very hot flame and is invaluable in the smelting of iron and the making of steel."
O'Day went back to Bitumen wiser in that he knew whom to fear, and with the privilege of freely selling to the young boys who had testified against him. Though to all appearances the matter ended here, the fight had just begun. It would have been impossible for anyone, except O'Day, to tell just how the trouble began.
At that joyous hour, just when the sunshine struck down on the smiling plain, and lake and river gleamed like silver, and all things woke to new hopes and fresh life, then the sky darkened, and the earth sank, and horrible rain of fiery bitumen fell from the black pall, salt mud poured in streams, and over all hung a column of fat, oily smoke.
In the older buildings, the bricks were merely piled together, without cement. Afterwards straw was mixed with the clay, but as early as Gudea's days the bitumen, abounding in the valley, became the common cement employed in all edifices of importance. The decoration was confined largely to the façades, the doors, and the floors.
The streets are broad and regular, and cut one another at right angles; there are sidewalks of granite, brick, or bitumen; there are lamp-posts in every direction. The houses are like palaces; their classically modern architecture, their irreproachable paint, their varnished doors and well-scoured brasses, fill with joy the city fathers and every lover of progress.
We had a very damp night, not from rain but from dew, though there is more rain in this part than in the interior. We had an uninteresting march next day, over desert and many stones, up and down hill, past a village called Ghaida, and went somewhat out of our way to see a rock with bitumen or asphalte oozing out of it.
Each page was held between two large plates of mica, and these plates were securely sealed around the edges by some black substance like varnish or bitumen. "Only thus," explained the patriarch, "could we hope to save this precious thing. It was done many hundreds of years ago, and even then the book was almost lost by age and use." "I should say so!" ejaculated Stern.
How had the bodies been preserved, for instance? They were perfect, except for that one detail of the man's breast. The air was full of the perfume he had learned to recognize as Yasmini's, but there was no sniff about the bodies of pitch or bitumen, or of any other chemical.
Among the mineral products of Assyria, bitumen, naphtha, petroleum, sulphur, alum, and salt have also to be reckoned. The bitumen pits of Kerkuk, in the country between the Lesser Zab and the Adhem, are scarcely less celebrated than those of Hit; and there are some abundant springs of the same character close to Nimrud, in the bed of the Shor Derrell torrent.
There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite? Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking ashes and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like those apples of asphaltes and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of earth will quickly disappear.
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