It came as a big shock to Brother Gregory and Brother Joseph to see the tenements of the vstup zakazan as the carriage took them to Otto Grunewald's textile mill. Although they did not go anywhere near the rotten core of the fetid slum, what they saw of the edges was more than enough. Brother Matthew was more of a realist, and had more experience than his two friend, but even he was alarmed at the living conditions of the mill workers in modern Brno.

"There are similar slums in English towns," Waldschmidt told them, "in fact the living conditions in some of the towns up north, in England, are causing serious concerns amongst the reformer movement. Recently the British government passed a law which says that workers in the mills cannot be forced to work more than 10 hours a day. The mill owners say this will wreck their business, but when I left that country, they were sill making huge profits".

It was almost with a sense of relief, therefore, that the carriage brought them to the gates of the textile mill. Brother Matthew noted the high walls, the iron gates and the armed guards, but did not say anything as they were escorted from the carriage, across the cobbles and into the main entrance of the mill.

Nothing could have prepared them for the sight, and sound, that greeted them in the main loom area of the manufactory. Extending from one end of the building to the other were four rows of large mechanical devices each about the height of a man and over five meters wide. Every part of every machine seemed in constant motion, and the noise generated as the metal slammed on metal was so great that it physically hurt the ear drums of the monks.

Suspended in racks by every machine, called a loom, were rows and rows of bobbins wrapped with threads and fibers of many different colors. These fed their contents into an amazing web of narrower rows and narrower rows, until they finally vanished into one end of the machine. Small children rushed around constantly removing bobbins that were running out of thread and replacing them with full ones again. A moment of carelessness and a child would be knocked off its feet by a flying rod or a rotating shaft. But this happened rarely, as the children had been performing these tasks for many hours, each day of their lives, since they were old enough to walk. It was the only life they knew.

A tugging on his sleeve altered Brother Gregory that the group was moving off, but before he joined them he could not help noticing an amazing fact - the men and women working around the looms were actually talking to one another! Mendel could hardly hear himself think, and these people were chatting away as if they were standing on a quiet street corner!

"They are surrounded by the noise for 12 hours a day, at least," he was told later, "The workers have become so accustomed to the constant noise made by the looms that they no longer hear it. Their ears ignore the sound of the flying shuttles and only hear each other's voices, so they can talk and listen as if they were in a normal room. It is an amazing trick they have acquired".

Mendel, however, could not hear a thing until his group had walked some way from the main loom area and into a heavily paneled set of offices that were completely decorated in very dark oak from floor to ceiling. A large fire was roaring away in an ornate stone fireplace, and a desk the size of a small field sat, like a squat bullfrog, right in the middle of the room. The engraved sign on the entryway said that the room belonged to the Ubergewebeleiter - the Mill Manager.

Waldschmidt carried out the introductions and the monks met a short, intense middle class German whose hair was closely cropped in the Prussian style, but whose face was totally forgettable. None of the friends could actually describe the man later, when they were discussing their visit. A photograph would have recorded a bland, clean shaven jowl that surrounded but did not support two pale blue eyes. A mouth that started and ended in no easily defined location, and a chin that came and went into the folds of skin on his collared neck.

His only remarkable feature was his posture, which radiated tension and an uncomfortable aggressiveness that began in his shoulders and continued to his hips, which tilted backwards thrusting his upper body forwards. As they entered the room Herr Lichtermann rose from behind his desk and thrust out his hand to the monks.

"Welcome, welcome," he said in a pronounced middle-German accent, "Herr Grunewald told me I might expect you soon. It is my pleasure to greet you here. But please accept my sincere condolences on the loss of your Abbot. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him personally, I am told he was a fine man, a fine man".

He shook his head sorrowfully, and guided his guests to chairs arranged with military precision around the sides of the room. They were hard, wooden and thinly upholstered in cracked red leather.

"You are aware, I think, of our ... er ... little problem. It is most kind, most kind indeed, of you to offer to help us," he continued. "We find ourselves in a difficult situation. The Countess requires her cloth, we have the dye that she requested, but now we cannot find the right way to bind it to the fibers. It is most frustrating".

"I would like to suggest the following plan, if you agree, that is. Herr Waldschmidt will show you around the mill and show you how we make the cloth, and then take you to the dye-works where the color is applied. He will explain it all to you. I would come myself, but," he said with a shrug of his aggressive shoulders, "other matters here require my urgent attention".

Since the desk held nothing more urgent than a gold inkstand and some malachite pens, the monks could not rationalize the last remark, but agreed to a guided tour from Herr Waldschmidt. "Later, perhaps, Brother Gregory would be kind enough to join myself and Herr Waldschmidt at my house this evening for a little dinner?" He looked at the other two monks, "I was not expecting such a large party," he shrugged again, "but I am sure there would be no problem in ... er ... having you join us?".

Hurriedly Brother Matthew disabused him of the need to extend his hospitality any further, and assured him that he, and Brother Joseph, would not be insulted in the least to return to the Monastery in Grunewald's carriage after their tour was over. At this the Mill Manager had the decency to hide his relief as best he could.

As nothing more needed to be said, the guests shook the manager's hand once more, and took their leave. Before going back to the vast caverns of the mill, however, Waldschmidt directed them to a separate room where they could talk before the sound of the mill overcame them once more.

Stored in this room were partially assembled looms and other machines that were in the process of being put into working condition.

"Are you familiar with the methods used to weave cloth?" he asked, and being told that none of the monks had this knowledge, he continued. "Making cloth is essentially very simple, and involves nothing more complex than converting threads, yarns or fibers into a flat piece of fabric. All the cloth produced in this mill is made by interlacing, or weaving, these threads together in precise patterns or orders called a 'binding system', or more commonly, a weave".

He walked over to a partially assembled loom, and began to point out its main features. "Weaving," he said, "is a mechanical process in which two different types of threads, called warps and wefts are usually made to cross each other at right angles, although this is not always necessary, it is the way it is done here.

"We weave cloth in this way because it can be done cheaply, and woven fabrics have special properties related to strength, geometry, and the fact that the components, the threads, in a whole piece of cloth are not fastened to each other in any way, but simply held in place by the friction of one thread against another.

He pointed to the sets of threads being tested on the new loom. "All cloth is made so it is longer in one direction than the other. Here," he plucked up one of the longer threads that ran from a bobbin into the end of the machine as was stretched out along the machine, "this lengthwise thread it the warp and can be extended indefinitely, depending on how long a piece of cloth you want to make. It is generally called an 'end' in England, and the term is becoming the same here in this mill.

"This piece," and here he teased out a thread that was already tightly woven in a widthwise manner, "is a weft thread, and is usually called a 'pick' or sometimes a 'shot'. They lie side by side in consecutive lengths and repeatedly fold back at the ends".

He could see that the three monks were having a hard time understanding the theory, so he brought them to a loom that was fully threaded and was being tested for its thread tension.

"Look," he said, walking to one end of the machine, and pointing to a strange row of rods and mechanical loops of metal and thread that connected to all the long, warp threads running along the loom.

"There are three stages to one weaving cycle. In step one, alternate long warp threads, the ones that run the full length of the fabric, have to be separated from one another. A 'heald' is the mechanism for doing this. As you can see," and here the monks came closer than they wanted to and saw that each warp thread had either been pulled upwards, or in the opposite direction, downwards.

"The heald mechanism has changed a lot since the first primitive looms, but basically what it does is separate alternate warp threads up or down so as to make a space, called a 'shed' between them. The weavers call this 'shedding'.

"Then, a 'pick of weft', or a widthwise piece of thread, is then passed along the space between all the threads in the shed pointing up, and all the threads in the shed pointing down. This is stage two, and is usually called 'picking'.

"In the last stage, the weft thread is 'beaten' backwards so that it is pushed very, very close to the previous weft thread and the cloth that is already woven. This is called 'beating in' or 'beating up' and is necessary if you are going to have a tight weave.

"The next cycle begins as the long threads of the warp are reversed, and a new shed if formed with different, usually alternate threads pulled up or down forming a new space into which a 'pick' thread can once again be inserted. As the new shed is formed, the previous pick thread is now trapped between two layers of warp threads and held fast where is cannot move.

"Thus, in one weaving cycle there is a shedding operation using this 'heald' mechanism, a picking operation in which a pick thread is passed between the up and down threads of the shed, and a beating in operation in which the last pick thread is pushed tight against the other threads in the finished cloth".

He paused to see if his audience was still with him.