more than their lips. Their glory will not quit their poor bodies.

I am borne away in one of the aeroplanes whose multitude darkens the
light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming
a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and
their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we
heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice
drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet
they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the
deranged of former generations appear at last to all people as comical
jests. Swept along by the engine's formidable weight, a thousand times
more powerful than it is heavy, tossing in space and filling my fibers
with its roar, I see the dwindling mounds where the huge tubes stick up
like swarming pins. I am carried along at a height of two thousand
yards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I have
fallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious air
which is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seen
conflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke which
flow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks of
the God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which the
stippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts,
descend in oblique parallels into the depths. One frightful night I
saw the enemy flood it all with an inexhaustible torrent of liquid
fire. I had a vision of that black and rocky valley filled to the brim
with the lava-stream which dazzled the sight and sent a dreadful
terrestrial dawn into the whole of night. With its heart aflame Earth
seemed to become transparent as glass along that crevasse; and amid the
lake of fire heaps of living beings floated on some raft, and writhed
like the spirits of damnation. The other men fled upwards, and piled
themselves in clusters on the straight-lined borders of the valley of
filth and tears. I saw those swarming shadows huddled on the upper
brink of the long armored chasms which the explosions set trembling
like steamships.

All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheets
of poison exactly as huge as the huge towns. Against them no wall
avails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as death
itself. Industry multiplies its magic. Electricity lets loose its
lightnings and