s what remnants of Italian aristocracy in
the mysterious upper stories. Having entered one of the palaces,
simultaneously with a tornado of wind, we passed through long, deserted,
narrow galleries, lined with thousands of small, caged compartments
containing "transformers," and on each compartment was a label bearing
always the same words: "Danger, 6,600 volts." "Danger, 6,600 volts."
"Danger, 6,600 volts." A wondrous relief when we had escaped with our
lives from the menace of those innumerable volts! And then we stood on a
high platform surrounded by handles, switches, signals--apparatus enough
to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant by
the unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!--and faced an enormous white
hall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be
revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of
conquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivably
tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful
ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own
vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard
produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and
solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant
spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting
columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood
nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York
was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand
horse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New York
would be immediately paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expire
beneath the eyes of a startled population. I could have gazed at it to
this day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that had
perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and
boilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an
extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of
another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was
lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the
furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by
itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million
cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these
stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators