1 But even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid.
2 Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before.
3 He simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit.
4 At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal into electric power.
5 It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all.
6 Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly strong pressure.
7 If there were coal under Sandringham, I would open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening.
8 The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
9 They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them.
10 Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron.
11 Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay.
12 They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass.
13 But you can't nationalize coal and leave all the other industries as they are.
14 They talk about putting coal to new uses, like Sir Clifford is trying to do.
15 Even under a Soviet you've still got to sell coal: and that's the difficulty.