Page:The Quest Volume 13 (1921-22).djvu/116

 have they had power of their own, but ever men remain still blind and think themselves masters and lords over them.

"Driverless locomotives, loaded with chunks of rock, rage on in mad fury, precipitate themselves upon them and bury hundreds and thousands beneath the weight of their iron bodies.

"The nitrogen of the air coagulates into terrible explosives. Nature herself hurries in breathless haste to offer her most valuable treasures to exterminate, neck and crop, the white monster who has furrowed her face with scars for millions of years.

"Steel creepers, with sharp horrid thorns, grow out of the ground, catch legs and tear bodies. In silent glee semaphores wag to one another and again hundreds of thousands of the hateful brood are destroyed. Hidden behind trees and hills giant howitzers lie in ambush, necks outstretched to the sky, with chunks of ore between their teeth, till treacherous wind-mills tap out to them insidious signals to spit forth death and destruction.

"Electric vipers hiss beneath the ground. Lo! a tiny greenish spark, and an earthquake uproars and instantly changes the landscape into a fiery general grave.

"With the shining eyes of beasts of prey searchlights peer through the darkness. More, more, still more! Where are they? See, there they come stumbling along in their grey shrouds—endless rows of them—with bleeding feet and dead eyes, staggering from exhaustion, half asleep, lungs panting, knees giving way under them. But quickly drums begin to roll with their rhythmic fanatical fakir's tattoo and whip the furies of a Berserker rage into intoxicated