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Updated: May 5, 2025
The distant sounds of the derricks and winches came muted through the tightly shut window that looked as though it never had been opened. A square of sunlight lit the upper part of the cheap lace curtain on the right of the window, and repeated its pattern vaguely on the lower part of the wall opposite.
This forest of salmon-colored masts, with their maze of cordage and their yellowish-brown sails drying in the sun, these tarred sterns with apple-green decks, these lateen-yards threatening the windows of the neighboring houses, these derricks standing under plank roofs shaped like pagodas, these tackles lifting heavy packages out of vessels and landing them in houses, these bridges opening to give passage to vessels, these clumps of trees, these gables overtopped here and there by spires and belfries; all this bathed in smoke, traversed by sunlight and here and there returning a glitter of polished metal, the far-off distance blue and misty, and the foreground full of vigorous color, produced effects of the most brilliant and piquant novelty.
On the margin of the lake were all kinds of hydraulic machines, small as toys, but of every conceivable form; derricks and wheels and screws and pumps, and all under the management of busy little elves, who panted and puffed and tugged at ropes and wheels and pipes as they worked, and kept up a constant chant not unlike the song of the wind on a stormy night. Leo watched them intently.
We crept through the tunnel this side of Lagny, and then stood on this side of the Marne, and whistled and shrieked a long time before we began to wiggle across the unfinished bridge, with workmen hanging up on the derricks and scaffoldings in all sorts of perilous positions, and all sorts of grotesque attitudes. I was glad when we were over.
The evidences of the great industry were on every hand, and the sight of the tall derricks, the refineries, the storage tanks, and the pipes where natural gas was continually burning, were such interesting ones that the lads never grew tired of looking from the windows.
I had had a good deal of correspondence with him in the meantime, urging him to prompt action, but he always had some good reason for delay. At last it was early in the summer he came with his derricks, a steam-engine, a trip-hammer, and a lot of men. They took off the roof of my house, removed the engine, and set to work.
Hampton. He had been riding horseback across the range, miles from any oil derricks or pumping stations, on his way to visit one of the "independent" oil operators. A lonesome cowboy hunting a stray was the only other human being in sight, and he was a half mile away. Suddenly out of the sky swooped an all-metal airplane, glistening in the sun.
There lay the hulk, all nuptial in colours, her roof looking like a plaza of Lima or La Paz at Carnival, flags in mountain-ridges round her edges, flags in festoons, in slanting clothes-lines, in trophy-groups, on bandroled poles, bedecking her; some scaffolding still round her; and three running derricks, capable of wielding guns and boilers of 140 tons, craned their shears about her.
The amazing network of rails which the British have thrown over Northern France, the endless strings of lorries, the warehouses bulging with supplies, the cranes and derricks, the repair depots, the machine-shops, the tens of thousands of men whose only weapons are the shovel and the pick, all help to further this impression. And, when you stop to think about it, it is an engineering undertaking.
They were, for a fact. Haste, avarice, an arduous diligence, was in the very air. Gray stared and marveled, for imagination was not lacking in him. Those derricks with their fires were high altars upon which were heaped ten thousand hopes and prayers. Altars of Avarice! Towers of Greed! That is what they were.
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