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Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground where the King's Royal Rifles lay. Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making them living torches, and in a second or two cinders. It was a new horror of war the Flammenwerfer.

An alleged searchlight has been seen flickering on the skies at night, and M , the British Minister, has in a burst of optimism declared that it is the relief under S signalling to us. Yet there are men who know exactly what it is the opening of the doors of a blast-furnace in the Chinese city, which sends up a ruddy light in certain weather.

From the earliest times, as among the native smiths of Africa to-day, the blast of a bellows has been used in working iron to increase the heat of the combustion by a more plentiful supply of oxygen. The blast-furnace is supposed to have been first used in Belgium, and to have been introduced into England in 1558. Next came the use of bituminous coal, urged with a blast of cold air.

He had been stationed near the blast-furnace of Les Izelquins, near Bethune, and had been in many air raids, when over sixty-three shells had blown his hut to bits and killed his men, until he could bear it no more. In the Amiens hospital some of the patients had their heads under the bedclothes like little children.

A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire.

Well, I'll admit I almost was done for." Again the volcano breathed in torment. It was like the sudden opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him vividly his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand.

This mode of operating produced somewhat better results, but still neither the iron nor the cinder obtained resembled the pig or scoria of the blast-furnace, which it was his ambition to imitate.

But we were all too glad to get ashore to think of vengeance then. Adler found work at the blast-furnace, while I was set to building huts for the miners on the east bank of the river where a clearing had been made and called East Brady.

And as water finds its levels, so will dust, earthly and human, the quick and the dead. It was after five in the afternoon. The sun was sinking, hazily but swiftly; ribbons of scarlet, ribbons of rose, ribbons of violet, lay one upon the other. The sun possessed no definite circle; a great blinding radiance like metal pouring from the mouth of a blast-furnace.

Excavations were in progress for the blast-furnace and accessory buildings, and developed a strange formation. The entire mesa seems built up of boulders packed together with a sort of alkali clay, dry and hard as stone, and looking, as our distingué guide remarked, as though not a drop of water had penetrated five feet from the surface since the time of the Flood.