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.”