"
Frank descended. Great heat came up to him, accompanied by a glow that
shifted and changed, dying down suddenly at one moment and glaring out
at the next. He could hear the ring of shovels and the clank of iron
doors.
He reached an iron grating, where a fierce heat rolled up and seemed to
scorch him. From that position he could look down into the stoke-hole
and see the black, grimy, sweating, half-clad men at work there.
Above him, at the head of the ladder he had just descended, a pair of
shining eyes glared down, but he saw them not. He had not observed a
cleaner who was at work on the machinery in the engine-room, and who
kept his hat pulled over his eyes till Frank departed.
The blackened stokers looked like grim demons of the fiery pit as they
labored at the coal, which they were shoveling into the mouths of the
greedy furnaces.
The shifting glow was caused by the opening and closing of the furnace
doors, which clanged and rang.
For a moment the pit below would seem shrouded in almost Stygian
darkness, save for some bar of light that gleamed out from a crack or
draft, and then there would be a rattle of iron and a flare of blood-red
light that came with the flinging open of a furnace door.
In the glare of light the bare-armed, dirt-grimed stokers would shovel,
shovel, shovel, till it seemed a wonder that the fire was not completely
deadened by so much coal.
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