to the Rhine. . . .

The Hungarian, the Italian peasant, yawned and thought the morning
dark, and turned over to fall into a dreamless sleep; the Mahometan
world spread its carpet and was taken in prayer. And in Sydney,
in Melbourne, in New Zealand, the thing was a fog in the afternoon,
that scattered the crowd on race-courses and cricket-fields,
and stopped the unloading of shipping and brought men out from
their afternoon rest to stagger and litter the streets. . . .

Section 2

My thoughts go into the woods and wildernesses and jungles of the
world, to the wild life that shared man's suspension, and I think
of a thousand feral acts interrupted and truncated--as it were
frozen, like the frozen words Pantagruel met at sea. Not only men
it was that were quieted, all living creatures that breathe the air
became insensible, impassive things. Motionless brutes and birds
lay amidst the drooping trees and herbage in the universal twilight,
the tiger sprawled beside his fresh-struck victim, who bled to
death in a dreamless sleep. The very flies came sailing down the
air with wings outspread; the spider hung crumpled in his loaded
net; like some gaily painted snowflake the butterfly drifted
to earth and grounded, and was still. And as a queer contrast
one gathers that the fishes in the sea suffered not at all. . . .

Speaking of the fishes reminds me of a queer little inset upon that
great world-dreaming. The odd fate of the crew of the submarine
vessel B 94 has always seemed memorable to me. So far as I know,
they were the only men alive who never saw that veil of green drawn
across the world. All the while that the stillness held above, they
were working into the mouth of the Elbe, past the booms and the
mines, very slowly and carefully, a sinister crustacean of steel,
explosive crammed, along the muddy bottom. They trailed a long
clue that was to guide their fellows from the mother ship floating
awash outside. Then in the long channel beyond the forts they came
up at last to mark down their victims and get air. That must have
been before the twilight of dawn, for they tell of the brightness
of the stars. They were amazed to find themselves not three hundred
yards from an ironclad that had run ashore in the mud, and heeled
over with the falling tide. It was afire amidships, but no one heeded
that--no one in all that strange clear silence heeded that--and
not only this wrecked vessel, but all the dark ships lying ab