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"
Grasp the nettle."
One day the three sons of Cossar, who were now no longer boys but men,
sat among the masses of their futile work and talked together after
their fashion of all these things. They had been working all day at one
of a series of great and complicated trenches their father had bid them
make, and now it was sunset, and they sat in the little garden space
before the great house and looked at the world and rested, until the
little servants within should say their food was ready.
You must figure these mighty forms, forty feet high the least of them
was, reclining on a patch of turf that would have seemed a stubble of
reeds to a common man. One sat up and chipped earth from his huge boots
with an iron girder he grasped in his hand; the second rested on his
elbow; the third whittled a pine tree into shape and made a smell of
resin in the air. They were clothed not in cloth but in under-garments
of woven rope and outer clothes of felted aluminium wire; they were
shod with timber and iron, and the links and buttons and belts of their
clothing were all of plated steel. The great single-storeyed house they
lived in, Egyptian in its massiveness, half built of monstrous blocks of
chalk and half excavated from the living rock of the hill, had a front a
full hundred feet in height, and beyond, the chimneys and wheels, the
cranes and covers of their work sheds rose marvellously against the sky.
Through a circular window in the house there was visible a spout from
which some white-hot metal dripped and dripped in measured drops into a
receptacle out of sight. The place was enclosed and rudely fortified by
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