he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest.
There is a place that waits for the lowest man -- the fer~
tilizer-plant!

The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers.
Not more than one in ten had ever really tried it; the
other nine had contented themselves with hearsay evi~
dence and a peep through the door. There were some
things worse than even starving to death. They would
ask Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to;
and Jurgis would debate the matter with himself. As
poor as they were, and making all the sacrifices that they
were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work that was
offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would
he dare to go home and eat bread that had been earned
by Ona, weak and complaining as she was, knowing that
he had been given a chance, and had not had the nerve
to take it? -- And yet he might argue that way with him~
self all day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer-works would
send him away again shuddering. He was a man, and he
would do his duty; he went and made application -- but
surely he was not also required to hope for success!

The fertilizer-works of Durham's lay away from the rest
of the plant. Few visitors ever saw them, and the few
who did would come out looking like Dante, of whom the
peasants declared that he had been into hell. To this part
of the yards came all the "tankage," and the waste prod~
ucts of all sorts; here they dried out the bones, -- and in
suffocating cellars where the daylight never came you
might see men and women and children bending over
whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts of
shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and
doomed to die, every one of them, within a certain defi~
nite time. Here they made the blood into albumen, and
made other foul-smelling things into things still more
foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was
done you might lose yourself as in the great caves of
Kentucky. In the dust and the steam the electric lights
would shine like far-off twinkling stars -- red and blue-
green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist

[[152]]

p151 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p152w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p153

v?