Page:Thea von Harbou Metropolis eng 1927.pdf/172

 METROPOLIS She fan across the square. She called for the guard, which, being on constant duty, had to give the alarm signal in dan-

ger of any kind. The guard was not there.

A wild upheaval of the earth dragged the girl's feet from under her body and- hurled her to the ground. She raised. herself to her knees and stretched up her hands in order, herself, to set the siren howling. But the sound which

broke from the metal throat was only a whimper, like the whimpering of a dog, and the light grew more and more pale and yellow. Like a dark, crawling beast, in no hurry, the water wound its way across the smooth street. But the water did not stand alone in the street. Suddenly, in the midst of a puzzling and very frightening solitude, a

little half-naked child was standing there: her eyes, which were stnI being protected, by some dream, from the all too real, were staring at the beast, at the dark, crawling ~ast. which was licking at its bare little feet. With a scream, in which distress and deliverance were equally mingled, Maria Hew to the child and picked it up in her arms. "Is there nobody here but you, child?" she asked, with a su~den sob. '~ere is your father]" Gone....
 * Where is r,0ur motherr'

Gone.... "'Maria could understand nothing. Since her Hight from Rotwang's house, she had been hurled from horror to horror, without grasping a single thing. She still took the grating of the earth, the jerking impacts, the roar of the awful, tearing thunder the water which gushed up from the shattered depths, to be the effects of the unchained elements. Yet she could not believe that there existed mothers who would not throw themselves as a barrier before their children when the earth opened her womb to bring forth honor into the

world. Only-the water which crawled up nearer and nearer, the impacts which racked the earth, the light which became

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