Dynamite in the Mountain: Nitroglycerine Made Safe
Dynamite in the Mountain: Nitroglycerine Made Safe — an invention story. 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder Inventions.
Page 1
The ice-glazed steps of Mariaberget dropped away beneath them like a frozen waterfall, and the straw-packed crate between Alfred's gloved hands felt heavier with every stair. His thin boots skidded on a slick of black ice, and his narrow shoulders pitched backward. The crate lurched from his grip and began to slide, runners scraping and shrieking against stone, gathering speed toward the quay where the rowboat waited on the dark water. Alfred shouted and flung himself after it, but his feet went out from under him entirely. Emil, bounding down three steps in a single leap, threw his whole body across the crate's path, slamming his chest against the wood and bracing his boots on a frozen step-edge. The crate jolted, tipped, nearly threw him off — until Immanuel, stooping forward with a grunt, rammed the brass-knobbed stick under the sliding runners and bore down with his full stooped weight, grinding the crate to a halt inches from the drop to the ice below.
Page 2
The mixing shed, no taller than a barn door and a half, stood glazed and quiet one breath and then was white fire the next. Alfred had just set down a flask on the hip-high bench when the air itself seemed to slam shut; he was flung clean off his feet across the cobbled yard, cracking into the water butt tall as his chest, staves bursting and freezing water sheeting over him. Emil, bent over the workbench stacking vials, vanished beneath a crashing wall of burning boards and timber as the roof folded inward. Immanuel, further off by the fence, was knocked to his knees by the blast-wind; he clawed upright, choking on smoke thick as wool, and hauled a scorched door bodily out of the collapsed frame, dragging it over the rubble toward where his son had stood. "Emil! Emil, answer me!" he roared, flinging the door aside and tearing at burning planks with his bare bandaged hands, while Alfred, soaked and gasping, scrambled up from the shattered barrel to help claw through the smoking wreckage toward the buried workbench.
Page 3
The gravediggers' shovels scraped gravel from the heap and sent it rattling down onto the coffin lid, each shovelful louder than the hymn the priest had finished. Alfred stood with his pince-nez clenched in his fist, watching the hole swallow the last of his brother. Beside him Immanuel's breathing had gone ragged, a wet rasping under the beard, and then his whole left side simply gave way, knee folding, shoulder dropping, and he pitched sideways into the frozen flower-beds banked against a leaning iron cross. His hat rolled off into the gravel. Alfred lunged and caught him under the armpit before his head struck the iron, shouting across the grave for help. Liedbeck came scrambling over the mounded earth, boots slipping on frost, and got his own shoulder under the old man's other arm. Together they hauled him upright between them, his boots dragging furrows through the frozen flowers, his stick left behind in the dirt, and half-carried, half-dragged his heavy stooped bulk out through the churchyard gate past the startled mourners, while the gravediggers kept shovelling behind them as if nothing at all had happened.
Page 4
The city had closed its ground to them, so the lake took the work instead. A broad covered barge rode low against the jetty in Bockholmssundet, its timber deck waist-high above the waterline, and onto it Alfred and the red-whiskered engineer swung the forbidden apparatus one piece at a time. A plank derrick creaked over the gunwale; Liedbeck hauled the rope hand over hand while Alfred guided a glass retort down into straw packing, steadying it against the barge's roll with both palms spread wide. A squat acid carboy came next, slung in rope netting, then the cast-iron stirring vat, big as a washtub, thudding onto the planks and rocking the whole vessel. Behind them on the jetty a constable hammered a printed notice to the post, each blow of his mallet loud as a shot. Immanuel sat propped in a chair nearby, his bandaged hand useless in his lap, his good hand clamped white-knuckled around the mooring line as though his grip alone kept barge and family from drifting loose into the grey water.
Page 5
The cart lurched on the loose sand, and with a crack like a pistol-shot the near wheel split along its felloe. The whole bed tipped, and a waist-high iron drum of nitroglycerine broke its ropes and rolled free down the bluff, spraying oily liquid in a dark fan across the pale slope. Alfred lunged after it, boots sliding, heart in his throat. But Hinrich was already running, his great bulk surprisingly quick, and he threw his three-fingered hand round the rolling rim and hauled it bodily to a stop against his own braced knee. Liedbeck scrambled down behind, grabbing the drum's far side to steady it upright. Alfred dropped to his knees where the oil had sprayed, pressing his stained fingers into the crumbling pale earth. Instead of the expected sheen of liquid death, he found only a damp, claylike putty, inert beneath his touch. He squeezed a fistful and stared, astonished it did not explode, did not even smell as fiercely as before, while below on the river the brown sails drifted on, indifferent to the three men's trembling discovery on the bluff above.
Page 6
Dawn had barely touched the heather when the mixing-house tore itself apart. The tarred roof, no higher than a man and a half at its ridge, burst upward in one sheet and came down again in a hail of shingles across the burnt pines. Alfred was flung against the doorframe, ears ringing to silence, a warm thread of blood sliding from one ear down his collar. He staggered up anyway, clawing at smoking timbers stacked chest-high, flinging aside splintered boards with bleeding hands until he reached the one earthenware crock, squat and waist-high, still sealed, still whole, and hauled it up against his ribs in triumph. Beside him Hinrich had already seized a stunned labourer by the belt, dragging the man bodily across the smoking floor and out through the buckled doorway, his three-fingered hand locked like an iron hook. Liedbeck came running from the blast-mounds, beating a smouldering sleeve against his own thigh, shouting words Alfred could not yet hear but could read on his moving lips.
Page 7
The pit opened before them like a wound of chalk cut into the dark heather, its walls taller than a man and bone-white from rim to floor. Alfred drove his long spade into the diatomite, levering up slabs light as pumice, while Liedbeck knelt below and shovelled the crumbled earth into waiting sacks. Hinrich straddled the ladder's foot, its rungs leaning steep against the pit wall, and hooked each full sack with his three-fingered hand the moment it reached him, swinging it up rung by rung to the lip. There an ox cart waited, its side board already white with chalked numbers. "Forty pounds this one, mark it fair," Liedbeck called, slapping the sack before it went up. Alfred straightened, back aching, and wiped his brow with a sleeve gone grey with dust. "Keep digging, we need twice this before dusk," he said, driving the spade again. Hinrich grunted, heaving another sack onto his shoulder and passing it hand over hand to the cart, never once setting a load down.
Page 8
The old quarry at Lägerdorf stood white and silent, its terraced walls rising twice the height of a man around a pool of standing green water. Hinrich climbed to the rim above a waist-high boulder, drew back his thick arm, and dropped a fat paste cartridge onto the stone below. It struck with a dull slap and lay there, inert as a sausage. Liedbeck, grinning under his red whiskers, snatched up a long-handled sledgehammer taller than his own hip and swung it full force onto a second cartridge laid on flat rock, again and again, until the paste only flattened and smeared. Then he struck a match and held the flame to a third, and it caught and burned low and steady like a tallow candle, curling black smoke into the chalk air. Only then did Alfred kneel beside the great ten-ton block that choked the quarry floor, pressed a mercury fulminate cap into a fourth cartridge with careful, stained fingers, and set the fuse. He backed away, raised his hand, and the block burst into scattered gravel with a flat crack that rolled off the white walls.
Page 9
The gallery at Merstham ran mouth-high into the chalk, its roof a man's height and a half above the rails, and down this white throat the three men carried the waxed cartridges cradled against their chests like loaves of bread. A line of English engineers stood along the spoil ramp in tall black hats, murmuring behind gloved hands, waiting to be disappointed. Alfred knelt at the face and tamped each charge home with a wooden rod, his thin fingers steady though sweat ran under his collar. Liedbeck fed him the fuse coil length by length, chalking the count on the gallery wall. The blast came low and hard, a cough that shook dust from the roof and sent the whole chalk face slumping outward in a pale avalanche. In the same instant a loaded spoil tram broke its brake on the ramp above and came rattling down loose and fast. Hinrich's three-fingered hand shot out, closed on Liedbeck's collar, and hauled him bodily off the rails a heartbeat before the tram screamed past empty air where he had stood.
Page 10
The mountain coughed and the ground shivered under their boots. From the black mouth of the portal, tall as two men stacked, a grey plume rolled out thick as smokestack breath, and far inside something rumbled on and on through the granite. Alfred stood on the spoil heap, a crumpled cartridge wrapper crushed in his fist, watching the dust climb against the snow peaks behind the gorge. Miners came pouring out pushing low wagons heaped with shattered rock, wheels screeching on the rails, voices shouting in three languages at once. Hinrich hauled the signal flag hand over hand up its pole with his three-fingered grip, the cloth snapping out red against the grey. Liedbeck strode along the spoil line counting paces aloud, chalk already out, measuring the spread of broken stone against his boot-heel. A wagon lurched and Hinrich lunged, hooking its rim before it could run, dragging it straight with one shove of his shoulder.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
- Format: 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder Inventions
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