For some minutes they followed Daniel around the court as he carried this treasure to several stations. A workman scrubbed it in a barrel of water to get rid of the salt. A goldsmith grasped it with tongs and thrust it into a furnace; for a few moments it was enveloped in fumes and colored flames as impurities were burnt off. Then it resolved to a pure glowing slab. He tugged it out, quenched it in water, and snipped off a corner for assay. Then Daniel took it to a weigher who tediously balanced it on a scale, and noted it in a book. Then it was across the yard to a mill consisting of two great brass rollers, one above the other like a mangle. A man fed the plate into the crevice between these as a boy whirled a crank on an elaborate gear-train. The rollers turned almost as slowly as minute-hands. What emerged from them was no longer a neat square: it had been mashed to an irregular oval blob, like pie-crust under a rolling-pin, thinner than a fingernail. It came out onto a kind of skid that had been fashioned from a whole ox-hide stretched over a frame the size of a dining-table. The plate lay on this like a lake of molten gold, almost smooth enough to bear reflections. Four men—one at each corner—now bore this across the court to a stall where a large shearing-machine had been established. The ox-hide pallet was mated to this, so that the golden sheet could be slid directly into the jaws of the shear. Two men now went to work slicing the lozenge of gold into a large number of strips, each about a hand-span in width. When this was finished they rotated the strips ninety degrees and fed them through a second time, cutting them into squares. Some of the cuttings, from near the edge, came out imperfectly shaped, and were pitched into a discard basket. The rest were piled into a neat stack. When they ran out of gold the shear-men twice counted and re-stacked the cards (for the gold squares resembled nothing so much as a deck of great playing-cards). All of the proceeds—including the basket of scraps—were given back to Daniel. He took them back to the weigher, who accounted for every iota of gold. Daniel then returned the scraps to the locked crypt.