INTRODUCTORY

It was towards the end of the twentieth century of the prehistoric era,
formerly called the Christian, that took place, as is well known, the
unexpected catastrophe with which the present epoch began, that
fortunate disaster which compelled the overflowing flood of civilisation
to disappear for the benefit of mankind. I have briefly to relate this
universal cataclysm and the unhoped-for redemption so rapidly effected
within a few centuries of heroic and triumphant efforts. Of course, I
shall pass over in silence the particular details which are known to
everybody, and shall merely confine myself to the general outlines of
the story. But first of all it may be as well to recall in a few words
the degree of relative progress already attained by mankind, while still
living above ground and on the surface of the earth, on the eve of this
momentous event.

I

PROSPERITY

The zenith of human prosperity seemed to have been reached in the
superficial and frivolous sense of the word. For the last fifty years,
the final establishment of the great Asiatic-American-European
confederacy, and its indisputable supremacy over what was still left,
here and there, in Oceania and central Africa of barbarous tribes
incapable of assimilation, had habituated all the nations, now converted
into provinces, to the delights of universal and henceforth inviolable
peace. It had required not less than 150 years of warfare to arrive at
this wonderful result. But all these horrors were forgotten. True, there
had been many terrific battles between armies of three and four million
men, between trains with armour-clad carriages, flung, at full speed,
against one another, and opening fire on every side; engagements between
squadrons of sub-marines which blew one another up with electric
discharges; between fleets of iron-clad balloons, harpooned and ripped
up by aerial torpedoes, hurled headlong from the clouds, with thousands
of parachutes which violently opened and enveloped each other in a storm
of grape-shot as they fell together to earth. Yet of all this warlike
mania there only remained a vague poetic remembrance. Forgetfulness is
the beginning of happiness, as fear is the beginning of wisdom.

As a solitary exception to the general rule, the nations, after this
gigantic blood-letting, did not experience the lethargy that follows
from exhaustion, but the calm that the accession of strength produces.
The explanati