Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [71]
Here at Para, also, is made a large part of the world’s supply of artificial silk. The disintegrated cellulose of the food-factories, after being thoroughly bleached to dazzling whiteness, is dissolved in one of the chlorinated alcohols, under pressure, to a glossy mass. This is afterwards put into a cylindrical hydraulic press and forced through plates filled with innumerable small discs of sapphire, through every one of which a hole one-thousandth of an inch in diameter is bored by diamond dust. The fiber, when it reaches the hot air of the room in which the press is situated, shrinks immediately by the evaporation of the alcoholic solvent, and is put at once on to reels. The entirely amorphous character of the material and the perfect surface of the sapphire die produce a fabric far more dazzling and beautiful than the silk formerly obtained from the silkworm.
Not knowing what had become of Graemantle, whom we had lost sight of when we were dodging the cyclone, and not wishing to be overtaken and interfered with by him, we had to hurry away from Para and the Amazon. Traveling mostly in the early evening or the early morning, when we were less likely to be observed or followed, we zigzagged through the air over Brazil, crossing the Andes two or three times from east to west and back, and than bearing down to Chili and the Argentine Republic. Everywhere in those regions we found the same system of building in use that had aroused my admiration in the United States. This is the “plastic” system of molding edifices, still more effective than the fusing of bricks into solid masses, which I have mentioned before.
By the plastic method immense palaces are reared for the ordinary dwellings of the rich, with miles of terraces and raised gardens, towers, domes, and long vistas of pillars, surpassing in grandeur even the imaginative conception of ancient Carthage as depicted by the old English painter Turner. State Capitols and all Government or municipal buildings and numerous vast churches filled with gorgeous chapels are built on even a greater scale of magnificence and massive proportions, in designs of exquisite beauty. Large corporations erect their structures by means of iron molds of every variety, all capable of being assembled like parts of a machine, and producing unitedly the total architectural effect desired, These molds are set up in position to form the whole house — the walls, doors, partitions, pillars; ceiling, and, with the aid of iron beams, the roof. The molds are faced with beautiful figures, and also, where appropriate, with sculpture in bas-relief. They are made from models supplied by the very best artists, working in harmony to secure the finest result; and, therefore, the effect of the building, when created, has nothing cheap or mechanical about it.
When the molds are all in place great iron tanks are brought to the spot, containing a stone like semi-fluid mixture, which is pumped through pipes into the molds. In three days this mixture becomes perfectly hard; the moulds are taken away, and a complete house or immense palace or cathedral stands revealed. Whole mountains are crushed to powder by gigantic machines, to furnish material for the plastic mixture; and many of the superfluous buildings in the formerly overcrowded cities have been ground up for the same purpose. A palace which would formerly have impoverished the richest of men, or even a prosperous State, is now put up and finished-except for the interior decorations, which must be done by hand-at an expense which among the ancients (of whom I was formerly one) would hardly have paid for the modeling and chiseling of a single great statue.
We extended our journey, with various pauses for rest, and frequent trips