gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those where the hurricane reels.  One senses this human material, in the cavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante’s guilty shades.  Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads, slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshine leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt.  Solid clouds overhang them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every second to the sky’s iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces change not under the ashes of death.  They wait, intent on the solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against which they are for the moment imprisoned.  They will be down forever around the spot where they are.  Like others before them, they will be shrouded in perfect oblivion.  Their cries will rise above the earth no 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.