“No, no.... Oh, Freder, if you could only force open the door wide enough for me to push the little children’s bodies through....” The man above her did not give her an answer. When steeling his muscles and sinews in the “Club of the Sons,” playfully wrestling with his friends, he surely never guessed that he would need them one day to force a path through ruined cables, upright pistons and out-spread wheels of fallen machines to the woman he loved. He thrust the pistons aside like human arms, clutched into steel as into soft, yielding flesh. He worked his way nearer the door and threw himself on the ground. “Maria—?” “Freder?” “Where are you? Why does your voice sound so far away?” “I want to be the last whom you save, Freder! I am carrying the tiniest ones on my shoulders and arms....” “Is the water still rising?” “Yes.” “Is it rising fast or slowly?” “Fast.” “My God, my God.... I can’t get the door loose! The machines are piled up on top of it like mountains! I must explode the ruins, Maria!” “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....” From the sooty black sky a frightful gleam, of the colour of spilt blood, fell 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, phantom-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,” so 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 lay over 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 of a kicked dog. He rubbed his sobbing mouth upon the little piece of steel. “May the stinking plague gnaw you, you lice—! May you sit in muck up to your eyes—! May you swill gas instead of water and burst every day—for ten thousand years—over and over again—!” “Grot!” “Filth—!” “Grot!!—Thank God.... Grot, come here!” “Who’s that—” “I am Joh Fredersen’s son—”