The ground was stained with iron. So is all the earth, which would look blanched and ghostly save for iron, but he was on the southern edge of the narrow region from which a billion tons have already been quarried. Men would go on digging iron till they suddenly discovered that they had no means to smelt it. There it would lie, its atoms arranged in the form of a cube with one atom at the centre, and twenty-six balanced charges in every atom, as useless as it was a million years ago. And all because the idiots that called themselves men persisted in killing off their Moseleys. No matter. Of what earthly importance were the regrets of a one-handed chemist sitting on the slag of a solid iron earth? Chapter 27. Cobalt He lifted his eyes and gazed on the Laurentians. Pencils of incandescence swept across them, whitening their tender purple and then fading, a sight to thrill the heart. Sometimes the pulsation would cease and the whole mountain, older than any Alp, would deepen to cobalt blue, reminding him that there might be cobalt within ten miles of him. In fact within a hundred all the noble metals were being mined. Like most men he loved blue, and what he chiefly loved was a soft cobalt blue saturated with white light, as in petals of forgetmenot. But that was mere personal preference. When he thought of color he should not be diverted by living tissue, but ought always to consider electricity. The more charges on the nucleus, the more color there ought to be. Since the first twenty-seven elements are comparatively light and abundant, color in real richness ought to begin at number twenty-eight He closed his eyes and dreamed of ascending scales—oxides running soberly in red and brown and black, sulphides fitting in with dusky gold, chlorides almost prismatic. He opened his eyes and perceived a faint mauve, and presently saw that it came from a musk mallow blooming there in the thin soil. It gave him a little shock, for no English or American chemist sees mauve without feeling that English and American must stick together against Germans. It was an Englishman who first discovered how to make mauve, but it was Germans who acted on the hint, ruining the madder fields of France and the indigo fields of Asia. Germans might yet ruin American labor and come to blows with Americans, but Marvin did not seem to care. In the hospital he had hated Germans with a consuming hatred. Now the languor of color seemed to have fallen on him like a dream. Finally he aroused himself and got down to business. He loaded his skiff, rigged his rod, and brought on board his tomato can with the crayfish. They had no idea of what was going to happen, and neither had he, but he pushed off and rowed south. The water felt good against the blades, always the soft resistance and never too much to overcome with ease.