is morbid thought, but it was succeeded by one
almost equally unhealthy, for I was ridden by a sudden wild impulse to
touch, feel, walk on, roll in the encroaching grass. I tried to control
myself, but no willing of mine could prevent me from going up and
letting the long runners slip through my half open hands. It was like
receiving some sort of electric shock. Though the blades were soft and
tender, the stems communicated to my palms a feeling of surging
vitality, implacable life and ineluctable strength. I drew back from the
green mass as though I had been doing something venturesome.

For, no matter what botanists or naturalists may tell us to the
contrary, we habitually think of plantlife as fixed and stolid,
insensate and quiescent. But this abnormal growth was no passive lawn,
no sleepy patch of vegetation. As I stood there with fascinated
attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in
thousands; not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass.
It writhed and twisted in nightmarish unease, expanding, extending,
increasing; spreading, spreading, spreading. Its movement, by human
standards, was slow, but it was so monstrous to see this great mass of
verdure move at all that it appeared to be going with express speed,
inexorably enveloping everything in its path. A crack in the roadway
disappeared under it, a shrub was swallowed up, a patch of wall
vanished.

The eye shifted from whole to detail and back again. The overrun crack
was duplicated by an untouched one a few inches away--it too went; the
fine tentacles on top of the mound reached upward, shimmering like the
air on a hot summer's day, and near my feet hundreds of runners crept
ever closer, the pale stolons shiny and brittle, supporting the
ominously bristling green leaves.

I hope Ive not given the impression there was no human activity all this
while, that nothing was being done to combat the living glacier. On the
contrary, there was tremendous bustle and industry. The weedburning crew
was still fighting a rearguard action, gaining momentary successes here
and there, driving back the invading tendrils as they wriggled over
concrete sidewalk and roadway, only to be defeated as the main mass,
piling higher and ever higher, toppled forward on the temporarily
redeemed areas. For on this vastly thicker bulk the smoky fingers of
flame had no more effect than did the exertions of the scythemen,
hacking futilely away at the