A wondrous relief when we had escaped with our lives from the menace of those innumerable volts!  And then we stood on a high platform surrounded by handles, switches, signals—­apparatus enough to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant by the unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!—­and faced an enormous white hall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans.  Immaculately clean, inconceivably tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and solitude.  We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting columns of metal.  It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable.  I understood nothing of it.  But I understood that half the electricity of New York was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand horse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New York would be immediately paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expire beneath the eyes of a startled population.  I could have gazed at it to this day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that had perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and boilers under the earth.  And even there we were almost alone, to such an extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of another sort of senseless matter.  The odyssey of the coal that was lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself epical.  Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators.  The lowest horror of the steamship had been abolished here.

I was tempted to say:  “This alone is fit to be called the heart of New York!”

They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figures were casually thrown at me.  As that a short circuit may cause the machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries!  As that in the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at a signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch, lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers!  As that the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three minutes—­but the current had never failed for a single second!  As that in one year over two million dollars’ worth of machinery had been scrapped!...  And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not Timbuctoo.