He saw the ocean of light which filled the endless trails of streets with a silver, flashing lustre. He saw the will-o’-the-wisp sparkle of the electric advertisements, lavishing themselves inexhaustibly in an ecstasy of brightness. He saw towers projecting, built up of blocks of light, feeling himself seized, over-powered to a state of complete impotence by this intoxication of light, feeling this sparkling ocean with its hundreds and thousands of spraying waves, to reach out for him, to take the breath from his mouth, to pierce him, suffocate him.... And then he grasped that this city of machines, this city of sobriety, this fanatic for work, sought, at night, the mighty counterpoise to the frenzy of the day’s work—that this city, at night, lost itself, as one insane, as one entirely witless, in the intoxication of a pleasure, which, flinging up to all heights, hurtling down to all depths, was boundlessly blissful and boundlessly destructive. Georgi trembled from head to foot. And yet it was not really trembling which seized his resistless body. It was as though all his members were fastened to the soundless evenness of the engine which bore them forwards. No, not to the single engine which was the heart of the motor-car in which he sat—to all these hundreds and thousands of engines which were driving an endlessly gliding, double stream of gleaming illuminated automobiles, on through the streets of the city in its nocturnal fever. And, at the same time, his body was set in vibration by the fire-works of spark-streaming wheels, ten-coloured lettering snow-white fountains of over-charged lamps, rockets, hissing upwards, towers of flame, blazing ice-cold. There was a word which always recurred. From an invisible source there shot up a sheaf of light, which bursting apart at the highest point, dropped down letters in all colours of the rainbow from the velvet-black sky of Metropolis. The letters formed themselves into the word: Yoshiwara. What did that mean: Yoshiwara—? From the iron-work of the elevated railway-track a yellow-skinned fellow hung, head downwards, suspended by the crocks of his knees, who let a snow-storm of white sheets of paper shower down upon the double row of motor-cars. The pages fluttered and fell. Georgi’s glance caught one of them. Upon it stood, in large, distorted letters: Yoshiwara. The car stopped at a crossing. Yellow-skinned fellows, in many-coloured embroidered silk jackets, wound themselves, supple as eels, through the twelve-fold strings of waiting cars. One of them swung himself onto the foot-board of the black motor-car in which Georgi sat. For one second the grinning hideousness stared into the young, white, helpless face. A sheaf of hand-bills were hurled through the window, falling upon Georgi’s knee and before his feet. He bent down mechanically and picked up that for which his fingers were groping.