es of the city, sucking them in as
into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some colossal
sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and out, only to
catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.

Thus it went, day after day. Endlessly, ceaselessly the Pit, enormous,
thundering, sucked in and spewed out, sending the swirl of its mighty
central eddy far out through the city's channels. Terrible at the
centre, it was, at the circumference, gentle, insidious and persuasive,
the send of the flowing so mild, that to embark upon it, yielding to
the influence, was a pleasure that seemed all devoid of risk. But the
circumference was not bounded by the city. All through the Northwest,
all through the central world of the Wheat the set and whirl of that
innermost Pit made itself felt; and it spread and spread and spread
till grain in the elevators of Western Iowa moved and stirred and
answered to its centripetal force, and men upon the streets of New York
felt the mysterious tugging of its undertow engage their feet, embrace
their bodies, overwhelm them, and carry them bewildered and unresisting
back and downwards to the Pit itself.

Nor was the Pit's centrifugal power any less. Because of some sudden
eddy spinning outward from the middle of its turmoil, a dozen bourses
of continental Europe clamoured with panic, a dozen Old-World banks,
firm as the established hills, trembled and vibrated. Because of an
unexpected caprice in the swirling of the inner current, some
far-distant channel suddenly dried, and the pinch of famine made itself
felt among the vine dressers of Northern Italy, the coal miners of
Western Prussia. Or another channel filled, and the starved moujik of
the steppes, and the hunger-shrunken coolie of the Ganges' watershed
fed suddenly fat and made thank offerings before ikon and idol.

There in the centre of the Nation, midmost of that continent that lay
between the oceans of the New World and the Old, in the heart's heart
of the affairs of men, roared and rumbled the Pit. It was as if the
Wheat, Nourisher of the Nations, as it rolled gigantic and majestic in
a vast flood from West to East, here, like a Niagara, finding its flow
impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of the Maelstrom, into
the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval energy, blood-brother of
the earthquake and the glacier, raging and wrathful that its power
should be braved by some pinch of human spawn