; the South African whites mercilessly
slaughtered the blacks against a possible uprising and the Kaffirs,
fleeing northward, repeated the European pattern of overcrowding, famine
and pestilence.

_89._ The day our Arabian depots were abandoned before the oncoming
Grass I felt my heart would nearly break with anguish. All that labor,
all that forethought, all those precious goods gone. And all because
Miss Francis and those like her were too lazy or incompetent to do the
work for which they were paid. I flew to the spot, trying vainly to
salvage something, but lack of planes and fuel made it impossible.
During this trip I caught my first sight of the Grass for years.

I suppose no human eye sees anything abstractly, but only in relation to
other things known and observed. With more than half the world in its
grip, the towering wave of green bore no more resemblance to its
California prototype than a brontosaurus to the harmless lizard
scuttling over the sunny floor of an outhouse. Between the dirtysugar
sands of the desert and the oleograph sky it was a third band of
brilliant color, monstrously outofplace. A tidalwave would have seemed
less alien and awful.

The distance was great enough so that no individual part stood out
distinctly; instead, it presented itself as a flat belt of green,
menacing and obdurate. As my plane rose I looked back at it stretching
northward, southward and eastward to the horizon, a new invader in a
land weary of many invaders; and I thought of the dead civilizations it
covered: Bactria, Parthia, Babylon; the Empire of Lame Timur, Cathay,
Cambodia, and the dominions of the Great Mogul.

The refuge of mankind narrowed continually, an island diminished daily
by a lapping surf. Africa was thrice beset, in the south from
Madagascar; in the center from the steppingstones in the Indian Ocean,
and across the Red Sea where the Grass sucked renewed life from the
steaming jungles and grew with unbelievable rapidity; in the highlands
of Rhodesia and Abyssinia it crept slowly over the plateaus toward the
slopes of Kilimanjaro and the Drakensberg. Unless something were done
quickly our Sahara depots would go the way of the Arabian ones and we
would be left with only our limited British facilities until the day
when Africa and Asia would be reconquered.

The violence and murder which had gone before were tame compared with
the new fury that shook the feartortured people of Europe, helpless in
the n