Page:Thea von Harbou Metropolis eng 1927.pdf/179

 METROPOLIS "Freder?"· "Where are you? Why does your voice sound so far away?" "I want to be the last whom you save, Frederl I am carrying the tiniest ODes on my shoulders and arms.•. "Is t water still rising?" "Yes. "Is it rising fast or slowlyr' "Fast." "My God, my God. . . . I can't get the door 100se1 The machines are piled up on top of it like mountains I I must ex.,. plode the ruins, Marial" . "Very well." Maria's voice sounded as though she were smiling. "Meanwhile I can finish telling my story.. ,,:' Freder dashed away. He did not know where his feet should carry him. He thought vaguely of God. . . . "Thy will be done. . . . Deliver us from evil. . • . For Thine is the ... power... 0" From the sooty black sky a frightful gleam, of the colour of spilt blood, feU upon the city, which appeared as a silhouette of tattered velvet in the painful scarcity of light. There was not a soul to be seen and yet the air throbbed under the' unbearable knife-edge of shrieks of women from the vicinity of Yoshiwara. and. while the organ of the cathedral was shrilling and whistling, as though its mighty body were wounded unto death, the windows of the cathedral, lighted from within, began, phanton-like to glow. Freder staggered along to the tower-house in which the heart of the great machine-city of Metropolis had lived, and which it had torn open from top to bottom, when racing itself to death, in the fever of the "12," 50 that the house now looked like a ripped open, gaping gate. A lump of humanity was crawling about the ruins, seeming, from the sounds it emitted, to be- nothing but a single curse, on two legs. The horror which layover Metropolis was Paradise compared with the last, cruel destruction which the lump of humanity was invoking from the lowest and hottest of hells upon the city and its inhabitants. He found something among the ruins, raised ,it to his face, recognised it and broke out into howls, similar to the howls oJ>

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