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The low range was severed by a gorge blasted out by human hands. It was a mountain valley in the making. High up on its sides were dirt and rock trains, dozens of compressed-air drills, their spars resembling the masts of a fleet of catboats at anchor behind these, grimy, powerful steam shovels which rooted and grunted quite like iron hogs.
It is a well-known fact in the use of compressed air that such a condition is the best possible way to secure an explosion. "It would all seem so natural, even if discovered," explained Kennedy rapidly. "The smoking oil smoking just as an automobile often does is passed into the compressed-air pipe.
Two years later, in 1863, two other Frenchmen, Captain Bourgeois and M. Brun, built at Rochefort a submarine 146 feet long and 12 feet in diameter which they called the Plongeur. They fitted it with a compressed-air engine of eighty horse-power.
On them resounded the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the way up the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky, were McClintic-Marshall men driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown at them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like comets' tails against the twilight void.
They found that the stop was at a little country station. A signal had suddenly flashed before the eyes of the engineer, telling him he must not think of running past, which accounted for the quick work of the compressed-air brakes. No need to tell what was wrong.
The voice, in ordinary tones, carried perfectly; and yet in that small space nearly 7,000 H.P. were being produced and transmitted to the propellers and to the storage batteries that operated helicopters and compressed-air system, as well as the lighting-plant of the air-liner. As the two men entered the engine-room, the Master nodded to Auchincloss.
Along this we made our way another hundred yards or more to where a dozen naked peons were operating compressed-air drills, then wormed our way like snakes over the resultant debris to the present end of the passage, where more peons were drilling by hand, one man holding a bar of iron a few feet long which another was striking with a five-pound sledge that luckily never missed its mark.
He was proud of the lighthouse, of which he was the principal keeper; and just before he started to explain to me the wonders of the compressed-air engines, he remarked: "First, you must know that a lighthouse-keeper's job is to watch for a fog." "What's your name?" I asked. He was the first real lighthouse-keeper I had met. The lighthouseman looked at me and then at one of the coast-watchers.
"Tell the crew we're going to run below the surface until the air becomes noticeably bad. We want to test out the compressed-air devices for purifying the atmosphere." So Hal stepped forward with the message. "Don't you think the air begins to smell queer already?" demanded Eph, looking up. "I'm willing to have some compressed air turned on right now."
It is the more inert nitrogen that refuses to get out of the blood after one has been under pressure, that forms the bubbles of gas which cause all the trouble, the 'bends, compressed-air sickness, you know." "Then that is how Traynor died?" I whispered, coming hastily to the conclusion. "Some one placed the wrong salt in there took out oxygen, added nitrogen, instead of removing carbon dioxide?"
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