Israel Potter: Chapter 24

Chapter 24

CONTINUED.

All night long, men sat before the mouth of the kilns, feeding them with
fuel. A dull smoke--a smoke of their torments--went up from their tops.
It was curious to see the kilns under the action of the fire, gradually
changing color, like boiling lobsters. When, at last, the fires would be
extinguished, the bricks being duly baked, Israel often took a peep into
the low vaulted ways at the base, where the flaming fagots had crackled.
The bricks immediately lining the vaults would be all burnt to useless
scrolls, black as charcoal, and twisted into shapes the most grotesque;
the next tier would be a little less withered, but hardly fit for
service; and gradually, as you went higher and higher along the
successive layers of the kiln, you came to the midmost ones, sound,
square, and perfect bricks, bringing the highest prices; from these the
contents of the kiln gradually deteriorated in the opposite direction,
upward. But the topmost layers, though inferior to the best, by no means
presented the distorted look of the furnace-bricks. The furnace-bricks
were haggard, with the immediate blistering of the fire--the midmost
ones were ruddy with a genial and tempered glow--the summit ones were
pale with the languor of too exclusive an exemption from the burden of
the blaze.

These kilns were a sort of temporary temples constructed in the yard,
each brick being set against its neighbor almost with the care taken by
the mason. But as soon as the fire was extinguished, down came the kiln
in a tumbled ruin, carted off to London, once more to be set up in
ambitious edifices, to a true brickyard philosopher, little less
transient than the kilns.

Sometimes, lading out his dough, Israel could not but bethink him of
what seemed enigmatic in his fate. He whom love of country made a hater
of her foes--the foreigners among whom he now was thrown--he who, as
soldier and sailor, had joined to kill, burn and destroy both them and
theirs--here he was at last, serving that very people as a slave, better
succeeding in making their bricks than firing their ships. To think that
he should be thus helping, with all his strength, to extend the walls of
the Thebes of the oppressor, made him half mad. Poor Israel!
well-named--bondsman in the English Egypt. But he drowned the thought by
still more recklessly spattering with his ladle: "What signifies who we
be, or where we are, or what we do?" Slap-dash! "Kings as clowns are
codgers--who ain't a nobody?" Splash! "All is vanity and clay."

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