Faster to be accepted were sanitary napkins. Existing custom used cloth fragments, when available. Yozef’s first models were made from either wood pulp or cotton. A red-faced Yozef endured an awkward meeting with Sister Diera, where he explained their use. The abbess was initially perplexed but offered advice on size and took samples to be tried by several younger women. Yozef and Myrfild were astonished when requests for the product started within days—first as a trickle and then a flood, from within Abersford, then the district, the rest of Keelan, and other provinces. The demand was relentless, in spite of husbands and fathers not seeing the same value as did women in spending coin on such an item. Yozef never explained why he called them “kotex.”
The second major new project originated from Yozef’s forgetfulness. One evening, he worked on updating his English-Caedelli dictionary. He planned to write for an hour. One advantage of the short affair with Buna Keller was that he now knew the Caedelli words for most male and female body parts that he hadn’t found the opportunity, or nerve, to ask anyone else. He suspected the querying and Buna’s rejection were connected—a twofer. It was time to add those new words to the dictionary. He wasn’t sure when he would have other opportunities to either hear or use the words.
He was working on the breast area when his whale-oil lamp went out. The sudden darkness startled him, until he remembered he should have checked the oil level. He knew there was more oil somewhere on the property, but he had no idea where and didn’t want to wake Brak or Elian.
Wait a minute! Whale oil? People on Earth only used whale oil until they killed most of the whales and then went to kerosene and vegetable oil lanterns.
Yozef didn’t know what local plants might produce oils, but kerosene he did know about.
Petroleum. Kerosene was a major fractional distillation product of crude oil. It could be produced from coal, which was abundant on Caedellium, though petroleum was more efficient— if there was a source. He remembered that crude kerosene had been produced from petroleum in limited amounts for thousands of years on Earth, but its common production and use for lighting didn’t exist until the 1850s.
The next day he wrote down all he remembered about petroleum and its fractional distillation. They were already distilling ether and ethanol, so how hard could it be to modify the procedure for petroleum?
Much harder, it turned out, yet not impossible.
First, they needed to find a source of petroleum on Caedellium. When Cadwulf proved no help, the two of them asked around the abbey and the village and found a tradesman who knew of the black, sticky substance used for caulking ships and waterproofing. He pointed them to a Gwillamese trader named Linwyr, who knew of several places on Caedellium where oil seeped into pools above ground. None of these petroleum seeps were nearby in Keelan Province, though just across the border in Gwillamer Province was a region avoided by farmers because of the prevalence of the noxious pools.
Yozef paid Linwyr one hundred krun to show him, Cadwulf, and Filtin the pools. On horseback, they followed the road into Gwillamer from Abersford, about twenty-four miles to where they left the main road and wound their horses into a marshy area a few miles from the sea. It was the longest horseback ride Yozef had made, and for the last few miles, he couldn’t get out of his mind the joke line “‘Fifty Days in the Saddle’ by Major Assburns.” He now appreciated the reference more, though the humor was lost in his present condition.
They smelled the pools before they saw them.
“Thank you, God or whomever!” Yozef exclaimed in English, as he gingerly dismounted next to an odious-looking pool with a skim of water covering the seep. Sulfurous odors came and went with the breeze off the water. The pool was both encouraging and discouraging. Encouraging, in that it existed at all, showing that surface petroleum did exist on Caedellium; discouraging, in that the pool was only three feet in diameter. Linwyr assured him that larger pools were nearby.
“I’m walking for a while to rest Seabiscuit,” Yozef asserted. Cadwulf objected, Carnigan smirked, and Linwyr grunted. They walked, Yozef slightly bowlegged at first.
They found several small pools in the next hour, and Yozef was about to give up when they hit pay dirt. Before them, in a shallow valley, lay a crude oil seep a hundred yards across.
“This is more like it,” said Yozef, kneeling down to inspect the crude. While any grade of petroleum could be used, the heavier grades would be useless in the foreseeable future, given the available level of technology and infrastructure. Yozef stirred the crude with a dead tree branch and got below the surface layer.
“Good, good,” he said. “This will work fine.” It looked like what was called “light-sweet” grade on Earth. If he was right, there’d be less of the heavier, more difficult to work with fractions and a high percentage of the lighter molecules. Benzene would come off early, and they could let it blow away—no worry about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules here. Then, 30 to 50 percent of the total would distill off as kerosene.
They probed the seep and found an average depth of three feet at six feet from the edge. Assuming the depth increased toward the center of the pool and the depression, there was enough petroleum to supply production until they found out whether kerosene would succeed as a product. If it did, they might have to drill, though it wasn’t something to worry about, yet.
“Linwyr,” questioned Yozef, “would it be a problem in either buying this land here in Gwillamer or in taking the crude?”
“We’d have to check with the local district center,” said the trader, “but I don’t think there will be any problem. Customs and laws in Gwillamer are similar to Keelan. Give me a couple of days, and I should be able to find out. Of course, my time is valuable, and who knows what unexpected problems might occur.”
After some dickering, it was agreed Linwyr would receive a percentage of profits from the Gwillamer petroleum. Yozef figured that giving Linwyr a small share in any profits, in exchange for his dealing with the Gwillamese, better ensured Linwyr’s dedication to the project than salary. Approval to take the oil came the next sixday, details about which Yozef never inquired, as long as the petroleum was available.
With paperwork in hand that Linwyr said authorized them to collect unlimited petroleum, the next two steps were how to get the oil to where it could be processed and distilled. Logistically, setting up the distillation at the source would have been more efficient, but at the beginning it would have to be in Abersford, where there were already shops and workmen. Yozef put Linwyr in charge of getting the petroleum to Abersford, and Filtin with working out the distillation.