These include the nitric-acid works, acid recovery, ammonia-mill, potash-mill, "guhr"-mill, steam and power houses, box-factories, washing, carding, and bleaching departments for the cotton, pulping-mills, and other contributing industries, connected by the steam railway tracks which join the Glasgow line.

 There are 450 separate structures, now occupying 400 acres out of the 600 owned by the company, which were, when the site was chosen by Mr. Nobel in 1871, a barren waste of sand dunes, stretching for a mile and three-quarters along the sea.

Into this kingdom of high explosives you enter by the courtesy of Mr. C. O. Lundholm, the works manager, under the guidance of the engineer of the works, Mr. E. W Findlay. The strain upon your nerves begins mildly. Your hair is quite ready to rise, so ready that you can feel it awake and stretch itself at every spot of grease which may be nitroglycerin - and every stray pinch of cotton - which may be gun-cotton.

You now understand for the first time the psychological condition of a shying horse. You go along just as the horse does, with eyes strained at every small object and a lurking predisposition to bolt.

The acid-works are soothing, however. They are quite safe. Nitroglycerin is made from glycerin, the sweetish adjunct of the dressing table, and nitric acid. The glycerin is bought by hundreds of tons from various sources. In this big barn which you enter the nitric acid is manufactured. In two rows stand fifty-eight steel retorts about six feet in diameter and four feet deep, which are bricked up like ovens.

Here sulphuric acid, or oil of vitriol, from Glasgow is combined with nitrate of soda from Chili, and the nitric acid thus set free passes over in the pipes to a high framework carrying numberless brown earthenware jars in which it condenses. As it passes over it gives off red – dish fumes which are suffocating - a whiff of them gives you a fit of coughing, and a full breath of them would choke a locomotive.

Mr. Findlay explains that the nitric acid thus made is mixed with a larger quantity of sulphuric acid, and removed in steel pony-cars to a station at the foot of each nitroglycerin hill. Thence the acids are drawn up by cable or blown up through pipes to a tank at the top of the hill by compressed air. You mentally compare the advantages of being blown up with compressed air to be blown up by other means, and smoothing down your hair, enter the Danger Area.

The Danger Area
To enter the "Danger Area" you must pass the searcher. He stands in front of his cabin, and you will find one of him always blocking the way at the four entrances to the explosive district. He is a tall, military-looking man in a blue uniform faced with red, and he takes from you all metallic objects - your watch, money, penknife, scarf-pin, match-case, matches and keys. None of these are allowed to be where nitroglycerin is.

He searches every man who enters, no matter how often the man may come and go, The girls, 200 of whom are employed, are not permitted to wear pins, hair-pins, shoe-buttons, or metal pegs in their shoes, or carry knitting, crochet, or other needles. These regulations are the outgrowth of experience and the long-ago discovery in dynamite cartridges of buttons and other

The Searcher at work at the entrance to a nitroglycerin Hill

foreign substances calculated to make trouble at unexpected moments. The girls are searched thrice a day by the three matrons who have them in charge. From the lack of hair-pins they wear their hair in braids, tied with ribbons, which gives them all an unduly youthful look. The searcher tells you that his chief trouble is with matches.

Some of the lower-class male employees – there are 1,100 men in the factory – are willing at times to smuggle in matches for a quiet smoke in a secluded corner. This quiet smoke may of course produce a much louder smoke in a corner not so secluded, and is therefore rigidly banned. The discipline in the factory is most extraordinary, and to it must be attributed the marvelous immunity from accidents.

At this point, too, you get your first glimpse of the "costumes." A man in a Tam O’Shanter cap comes up clothed from head to foot in vivid scarlet. He belongs to a nitroglycerin house. Then comes a man in dark blue, a "runner" or carrier of explosives.

Then comes a man in light blue, who belongs to a smokeless-powder factory. All the girls are in dark blue. The different colours are used so that a superintendent at any distance can always tell if a man is on his own ground and attending to his own work.

A few weeks since, a cartridge lassie in dark blue said to a man in scarlet, "Gi’e us a kiss," and he promptly gi’ed her one. This unlawful combination of colours caught the eye of an overseer hundreds of yards away, and the pair were instantly removed from the works and the pay-roll.