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After checking the condition of all the valves, he first opened the middle one of the six searchlight valves. Luo Chong then went to the equipment room on the sixth floor. It contained not only a water tank and a calcium carbide chamber, but also an acetylene reactor and a steam whistle. The whistle, however, was not usually activated.

Luo Chong checked the reactor's fuel load. This egg-shaped acetylene generator could burn for nearly an entire night on a single load. By the next morning, it would be left with basically nothing but slaked lime. He could then empty out the lime and replace it with fresh material during the day.

He checked the fuel load, shut all the valves, and inspected the seals. Then he turned the water-supply valve to the first setting. Clean water flowed through the pipes into the reactor and began reacting violently with the calcium carbide inside, producing a flammable hydrocarbon gas—acetylene. As more and more acetylene formed, it rose into the gas-filtering barrel above the reactor, passed through several layers of bamboo strips and gauze, and finally became clean, dust-free acetylene that rose into the lighting pipes of the Glass Room on the top floor.

At that point, Luo Chong returned to the Glass Room. He took out a feather and held it to the nozzle in the center of the burner, observing the actual gas flow. What emerged at first was not acetylene, but the air remaining in the reactor. When he caught a faint, barely perceptible odor, he knew the acetylene had arrived.

He put away the feather and took out a bamboo splint for lighting fires. After igniting it inside the handheld calcium carbide lamp, he used it to light the lighthouse's burner. A ball of flame whooshed out from the