Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/210

 wherewith the first two sheets of the number were finished. But the strip continued on its mad career, twisting itself through a whole labyrinth of cylinders, which printed further pages on further sheets; through sharp, tiny wheels which indented, through knives which cut it across: through disks which touched it with sticking-paste: through steel arms which folded it, till it reached the point where it was met by another strip of half its size, which had undergone the same treatment of cylinders, disks, knives and arms, and had thereby been turned into a supplement. By an ingenious device this was folded and pasted into the number, so that both paper streams, ready printed, cut and pasted, emerged from the opening as the complete newspaper, of which five copies a second were deposited on a stand, and taken off by the hands of young transport workers.

All this happens amid an overpowering, penetrating din, as though a gale were shrieking with inharmonious howls through the pipes of a gigantic organ, or as if all the two hundred thousand readers of the daily paper, collected under the vault of the printing house, were reading all the columns at the same time in breathless haste. Every