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Updated: June 14, 2025
On the walls were hangings with occult figures; the pillars were painted with weird and grewsome pictures; crucibles and cauldrons of various sizes were simmering over braziers on little altars; on the shelves and tables stood cups, phials, and vases, a wheel on which a wryneck hopped up and down, wax images of men and women some with needles through their hearts, a cage full of bats, and glass jars containing spiders, frogs, leeches, beetles, scorpions, centipedes and other foul creatures; and lengthways down the room was stretched a short rope walk, used in a Thracian form of magic.
After the ascent of many steps a door opened before them, and they found themselves in a spacious chamber, brightly, yet from its size imperfectly illumined by a single large lamp. It was wainscoted with ebony, and the furniture was of the same. A long table was covered with scrolls, skulls, crucibles, crystals, star-charts, geomantic figures, and other appurtenances of a magician's calling.
Much had certainly been done when a citizen king was thought of and set agoing; but even a citizen king required to be wound up, and the alchemist was still at his crucibles. Now, indeed, the work has been finished. The laboratory is closed. The philosopher, his task all done, has retired to his needed rest. Thinking men, even thinking Frenchmen, can live contented. Chocolate is sold and paid for.
The buried masses were found in various stages of failure, arising from imperfect melting, breaking of crucibles, and bad fluxes; and had been hid away as so much spoiled steel of which nothing could be made.
All the gold and silver ornaments disappeared: a great part of them were dissolved in the crucibles of the mint, after having been presented as a homage to the Convention, some of whose members danced the carmagnole with those who presented them at their bar, loaded on the back of mules and asses, bedecked with all the emblems of catholic worship; while several of the rubies, emeralds, &c. which had formerly decorated the glory, beaming round the head of a Christ, were afterwards seen glittering on the finger of the revolutionary committee-men.
There the senior professor of geology had sat up with it far into the night in a darkened laboratory, with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in a magician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled it "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it.
In special cases these may be advantageously replaced by an asbestos filter in a perforated porcelain or platinum crucible, commonly known, from its originator, as a "Gooch filter." The operation and use of a filter of this type is described on page 103. Porous crucibles of a material known as alundum may also be employed to advantage in special cases.
The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research.
'She no sooner finished speaking than Hephaistos went to his work-bench and set his bellows twenty were there working. And the twenty bellows blew into the crucibles and made bright and hot fires. Then Hephaistos threw into the fires bronze and tin and silver and gold. He set on the anvil-stand a great anvil, and took in one hand his hammer and in the other hand his tongs.
She wanted to learn how the machinery of government worked, and what was the quality of the men who controlled it. One by one, she passed them through her crucibles, and tested them by acids and by fire. A few survived her tests and came out alive, though more or less disfigured, where she had found impurities.
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