Page:The life of the bee (IA cu31924101469827).pdf/389

The Progress of the Race past been erecting cities, not with stones, bricks, and lime, but with some pliable substance painfully secreted by special organs of our body. One day an all-powerful being places us in the midst of a fabulous city. We recognise that it is made of a substance similar to the one that we secrete, but, as regards the rest, it is a dream, whereof what is logical is so distorted, so reduced, and as it were concentrated, as to be more disconcerting almost than had it been incoherent. Our habitual plan is there; in fact, we find everything that we had expected; but all has been put together by some antecedent force that would seem to have crushed it, arrested it in the mould, and to have hindered its completion. The houses whose height must attain some four or five yards are the merest protuberances, that our two hands can cover. Thousands of walls are indicated by signs that hint 377