e great
city.

"But in that city was not darkness! Lights were everywhere in it,
flashing brilliant lights that shone from its mighty buildings and that
blinked and burned and ran like water in great symbols upon the
buildings above the streets. Their glare was like that of day! We
stopped before a great building into which Rastin and Thicourt led me.

"It was vast inside and in it were many people in rows on rows of seats.
I thought it a cathedral at first but saw soon that it was not. The wall
at one end of it, toward which all in it were gazing, had on it pictures
of people, great in size, and those pictures were moving as though
themselves alive! And they were talking one to another, too, as though
with living voices! I trembled. What magic!

"With Rastin and Thicourt in seats beside me, I watched the pictures
enthralled. It was like looking through a great window into strange
worlds. I saw the sea, seemingly tossing and roaring there before me,
and then saw on it a ship, a vast ship of size incredible, without sails
or oars, holding thousands of people. I seemed on that ship as I
watched, seemed moving forward with it. They told me it was sailing over
the western ocean that never men had crossed. I feared!

"Then another scene, land appearing from the ship. A great statue,
upholding a torch, and we on the ship seemed passing beneath it. They
said that the ship was approaching a city, the city of New York, but
mists hid all before us. Then suddenly the mists before the ship cleared
and there before me seemed the city.

* * * * *

"Mother of God, what a city! Climbing range on range of great
mountain-like buildings that aspired up as though to scale heaven
itself! Far beneath narrow streets pierced through them and in
the picture we seemed to land from the ship, to go through those
streets of the city. It was an incredible city of madness! The
streets and ways were mere chasms between the sky-toppling buildings!
People--people--people--millions on millions of them rushed through the
endless streets. Countless ground-vehicles rushed to and fro also, and
other different ones that roared above the streets and still others
below them!

"Winged flying-cars and great airships were sailing to and fro over the
titanic city, and in the waters around it great ships of the sea and
smaller ships were coming as man never dreamed of surely, that reached
out from the mighty city on all sides.