And so after strange delays and through an avenue of doubt and battle, this man from the nineteenth century came at last to his position at the head of that complex world.
At first when he rose from the long deep sleep that followed his rescue and the surrender of the Council, he did not recognise his surroundings. By an effort he gained a clue in his mind, and all that had happened came back to him, at first with a quality of insincerity like a story heard, like something read out of a book. And even before his memories were clear, the exultation1 of his escape, the wonder of his prominence2 were back in his mind. He was owner of the world; Master of the Earth. This new great age was in the completest sense his. He no longer hoped to discover his experiences a dream; he became anxious now to convince himself that they were real.
An obsequious3 valet assisted him to dress under the direction of a dignified4 chief attendant, a little man whose face proclaimed him Japanese, albeit5 he spoke6 English like an Englishman. From the latter he learnt something of the state of affairs. Already the revolution was an accepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout the city. Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the most part with delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the thousand cities of Western America, after two hundred years still jealous of New York, London, and the East, had risen almost unanimously two days before at the news of Graham's imprisonment7. Paris was fighting within itself. The rest of the world hung in suspense8.
While he was breaking his fast, the sound of a telephone bell jetted from a corner, and his chief attendant called his attention to the voice of Ostrog making polite enquiries. Graham interrupted his refreshment9 to reply. Very shortly Lincoln arrived, and Graham at once expressed a strong desire to talk to people and to be shown more of the new life that was opening before him. Lincoln informed him that in three hours' time a representative gathering10 of officials and their wives would be held in the state apartments of the wind-vane Chief. Graham's desire to traverse the ways of the city was, however, at present impossible, because of the enormous excitement of the people. It was, however, quite possible for him to take a bird's-eye view of the city from the crow's nest of the wind-vane keeper. To this accordingly Graham was conducted by his attendant. Lincoln; with a graceful11 compliment to the attendant, apologised for not accompanying them, on account of the present pressure of administrative12 work.
Higher even than the most gigantic, wind-wheels hung this crow's nest, a clear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck13 on a spear of metallic14 filigree15, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was drawn16 in a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway17 down the frail-seeming stem was a light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes--minute they looked from above--rotating slowly on the ring of its outer rail. These were the specula, _en rapport_ with the wind-vane keeper's mirrors, in one of which Ostrog had shown him the coming of his rule. His Japanese attendant ascended18 before him and they spent nearly an hour asking and answering questions.
It was a day full of the promise and quality of spring. The touch of the wind warmed. The sky was an intense blue and the vast expanse of London shone dazzling under the morning sun. The air was clear of smoke and haze19, sweet as the air of a mountain glen.
Save for the irregular oval of ruins about the House of the Council and the black flag of the surrender that fluttered there, the mighty20 city seen from above showed few signs of the swift revolution that had, to his imagination, in one night and one day, changed the destinies of the world. A multitude of people still swarmed21 over these ruins, and the huge openwork stagings in the distance from which started in times of peace the service of aeroplanes to the various great cities of Europe and America, were also black with the victors. Across a narrow way of planking raised on trestles that crossed the ruins a crowd of workmen were busy restoring the connection between the cables and wires of the Council House and the rest of the city, preparatory to the transfer thither22 of Ostrog's headquarters from the Wind-Vane buildings.
For the rest the luminous23 expanse was undisturbed. So vast was its serenity24 in comparison with the areas of disturbance25, that presently Graham, looking beyond them, could almost forget the thousands of men lying out of sight in the artificial glare within the quasi-subterranean labyrinth26, dead or dying of the overnight wounds, forget the improvised27 wards28 with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and bearers feverishly29 busy, forget, indeed, all the wonder, consternation30 and novelty under the electric lights. Down there in the hidden ways of the anthill he knew that the revolution triumphed, that black everywhere carried the day, black favours, black banners, black festoons across the streets. And out here, under the fresh sunlight, beyond the crater31 of the fight, as if nothing had happened to the earth, the forest of wind vanes that had grown from one or two while the Council had ruled, roared peacefully upon their incessant32 duty.
Far away, spiked33, jagged and indented34 by the wind vanes, the Surrey Hills rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours of Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest35 and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farm houses had nestled among their trees, wind-wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like them vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive36 symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly37 the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries38 of the city. And underneath39 these wandered the countless40 flocks and herds41 of the British Food Trust, his property, with their lonely guards and keepers.
Not a familiar outline anywhere broke the cluster of gigantic shapes below. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings in Westminster, embedded42 out of sight, arched over and covered in among the giant growths of this great age. The Thames, too, made no fall and gleam of silver to break the wilderness43 of the city; the thirsty water mains drank up every drop of its waters before they reached the walls. Its bed and estuary44, scoured45 and sunken, was now a canal of sea water, and a race of grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of trade from the Pool thereby46 beneath the very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in the eastward47 between earth and sky hung the clustering masts of the colossal48 shipping49 in the Pool. For all the heavy traffic, for which there was no need of haste, came in gigantic sailing ships from the ends of the earth, and the heavy goods for which there was urgency in mechanical ships of a smaller swifter sort.
And to the south over the hills came vast aqueducts with sea water for the sewers50, and in three separate directions ran pallid51 lines--the roads, stippled52 with moving grey specks53. On the first occasion that offered he was determined54 to go out and see these roads. That would come after the flying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officer described them as a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards wide, each one for the traffic going in one direction, and made of a substance called Eadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he could gather, resembling toughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic of narrow rubber-shod vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled vehicles, sweeping55 along at velocities56 of from one to six miles a minute. Railroads had vanished; a few embankments remained as rust-crowned trenches57 here and there. Some few formed the cores of Eadhamite ways.
Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleets of advertisement balloons and kites that receded58 in irregular vistas59 northward60 and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. No great aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only one little-seeming monoplane circled high in the blue distance above the Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.
A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some gigantic hotel-like edifice61 stood amid square miles of some single cultivation62 and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham, or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable63 such a change had been. The old order had dotted the country with farmhouses64, and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and church--the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town, where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon, doctor, draper, milliner and so forth65 lived. Every eight miles--simply because that eight mile marketing66 journey, four there and back, was as much as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came into play, and after them the light railways, and all the swift new motor cars that had replaced waggons67 and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts of elastic68 durable69 substances--the necessity of having such frequent market towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer with their suggestion of an infinite ocean of labour.
And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity70 of the mechanism71 of living increased, life in the country had become more and more costly72, or narrow and impossible. The disappearance73 of vicar and squire74, the extinction75 of the general practitioner76 by the city specialist; had robbed the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster, and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated77 savage78. In the country were neither means of being clothed nor fed (according to the refined conceptions of the time), no efficient doctors for an emergency, no company and no pursuits.
Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer the equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting79 the condition of the city clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coaly foulness80 of its air, the labourers now came to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his development. First had come the nomad81, the hunter, then had followed the agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose towns and cities and ports were but the headquarters and markets of the countryside. And now, logical consequence of an epoch82 of invention, was this huge new aggregation83 of men.
Such things as these, simple statements of fact though they were to contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. And when he glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existed on the Continent, it failed him altogether.
He had a vision of city beyond city; cities on great plains, cities beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin84, cities girdled by snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was spoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negro and "Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday-language of two-thirds of humanity. On the Continent, save as remote and curious survivals, three other languages alone held sway--German, which reached to Antioch and Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Cadiz; a Gallicised Russian which met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the "Pidgin" English in Pekin; and French still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity85, which shared the Mediterranean86 with the Indian English and German and reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.
And everywhere now through the city-set earth, save in the administered "black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan87 social organisation88 prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his property and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; the whole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was his property....
Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous89, and in some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken. Strange places reminiscent of the legendary90 Sybaris, cities of art and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile91 wonderful cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring labyrinth below.
Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that these latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth century as the figure of an idyllic92 easy-going life. He turned his eyes to the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factories of that intricate maze93....
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1
exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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prominence
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| n.突出；显著；杰出；重要 | |
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obsequious
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| adj.谄媚的，奉承的，顺从的 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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albeit
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| conj.即使；纵使；虽然 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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imprisonment
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| n.关押，监禁，坐牢 | |
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suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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administrative
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| adj.行政的，管理的 | |
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speck
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| n.微粒，小污点，小斑点 | |
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metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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filigree
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| n.金银丝做的工艺品；v.用金银细丝饰品装饰；用华而不实的饰品装饰；adj.金银细丝工艺的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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halfway
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| adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途 | |
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ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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serenity
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| n.宁静，沉着，晴朗 | |
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disturbance
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| n.动乱，骚动；打扰，干扰；(身心)失调 | |
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labyrinth
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| n.迷宫；难解的事物；迷路 | |
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improvised
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| a.即席而作的,即兴的 | |
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wards
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| 区( ward的名词复数 )； 病房； 受监护的未成年者； 被人照顾或控制的状态 | |
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feverishly
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| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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consternation
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| n.大为吃惊，惊骇 | |
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crater
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| n.火山口，弹坑 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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spiked
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| adj.有穗的；成锥形的；有尖顶的 | |
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indented
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| adj.锯齿状的，高低不平的；缩进排版 | |
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crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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incessantly
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| ad.不停地 | |
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arteries
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| n.动脉( artery的名词复数 )；干线，要道 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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herds
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| 兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众 | |
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embedded
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| a.扎牢的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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estuary
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| n.河口，江口 | |
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scoured
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| 走遍（某地）搜寻（人或物）( scour的过去式和过去分词 )； （用力）刷； 擦净； 擦亮 | |
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thereby
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| adv.因此，从而 | |
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eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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colossal
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| adj.异常的，庞大的 | |
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shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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sewers
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| n.阴沟，污水管，下水道( sewer的名词复数 ) | |
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pallid
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| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
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stippled
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| v.加点、绘斑，加粒( stipple的过去式和过去分词 )；（把油漆、水泥等的表面）弄粗糙 | |
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specks
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| n.眼镜；斑点，微粒，污点( speck的名词复数 ) | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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velocities
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| n.速度( velocity的名词复数 )；高速，快速 | |
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trenches
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| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
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receded
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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northward
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| adv.向北；n.北方的地区 | |
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edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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cultivation
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| n.耕作，培养，栽培（法），养成 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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farmhouses
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| n.农舍，农场的主要住房( farmhouse的名词复数 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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marketing
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| n.行销，在市场的买卖，买东西 | |
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waggons
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| 四轮的运货马车( waggon的名词复数 )； 铁路货车； 小手推车 | |
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elastic
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| n.橡皮圈，松紧带；adj.有弹性的；灵活的 | |
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durable
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| adj.持久的，耐久的 | |
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complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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costly
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| adj.昂贵的，价值高的，豪华的 | |
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disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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squire
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| n.护卫, 侍从, 乡绅 | |
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extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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practitioner
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| n.实践者，从事者；(医生或律师等)开业者 | |
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isolated
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| adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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inverting
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| v.使倒置，使反转( invert的现在分词 ) | |
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foulness
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| n. 纠缠, 卑鄙 | |
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nomad
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| n.游牧部落的人，流浪者，游牧民 | |
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epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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83
aggregation
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| n.聚合，组合；凝聚 | |
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84
margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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85
lucidity
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| n.明朗，清晰，透明 | |
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86
Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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87
cosmopolitan
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| adj.世界性的，全世界的，四海为家的，全球的 | |
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88
organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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89
voluptuous
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| adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的 | |
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90
legendary
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| adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学） | |
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91
sterile
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| adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的 | |
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92
idyllic
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| adj.质朴宜人的，田园风光的 | |
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93
maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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