because they were hard or
unpleasant--on the contrary, they carried me from one success to
another--but because they have, in memory, the dreamlike quality of
unreality, elusive, vague and tantalizing.

Like a dream, too, was the actual progress of the Grass. We were all, I
think, impressed by the sense of repetition, of a scene enacted over and
over again. It was this quality which gives my story, now that I look
back upon it, a certain distortion, for no one, hearing it for the first
time, and not as any reader of these words must be, thoroughly familiar
with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the Grass.
These efforts existed; we did not yield without struggles; we fought for
South America as we had fought for North America. But it was a nightmare
fight; our endeavors seem retrospectively those of the paralyzed....

The Grass gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into
submission and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the
inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx
from sparsely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror,
disruption and confusion; pestilence, hysteria and famine.

The drama was not played through in one act, but many; to a world
waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and
years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive
hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended; the green curtain came
down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. The Grass
looked wistfully across at Tierra del Fuego, the land of ice and fire,
but even its voracity balked, momentarily at any rate, at the
inhospitable island and left it to whatever refugees chose its shores as
a slower but still certain death.

South America finally gone, the rest of the globe breathed easier. It
would be a slander on humanity to say there was actual rejoicing when
the World Congress sealed off this continent too, but whatever sorrow
was felt for its loss was balanced by the feeling that at long last the
peril of the Grass was finally ended. No longer would speculative
Germans, thoughtful Chinese or wakeful Englishmen wonder if the
supercyclone fans were indeed an effective barrier; no longer would
Cubans, Colombians or Venezuelans look northward apprehensively. Oceanic
barriers now confined the peril and though the world was shrunken and
hurt it was yet alive. More, it was free from fear for the firs