Amid all this, men struggle, surge, call out, fall choking, toil with backs bent over the earth in black arcs. Crowds of them clatter, scramble, bustle, push, and drift away. They creep, black, greasy masses, out of the earth like ants; they swing out on great frozen blocks of steel or marble; they saunter in some forgotten place; they yawn with the weariness of little towns. Men, brown, black, yellow, pallid with fatigue, ruddy with gluttony, blotched with disease, swarm and waver back and forth, east, west, south, north. Crackling twigs of dripping forests mark their feet. Red wet furrowed plains receive their pains. Grey, hungry factory towns bellow out through steam-filled lungs for them each morning. Prison gates grate slowly, hospital beds spread stateliness, insane asylums gibber through their windows. They hustle and shovel, piling heaps of hovels, and now and then, as if in mockery, some coppery tower that seems as if it would split its sky with its majesty. They are in a great shallow sea, crinkling uneasily as if some giant’s body were wallowing beneath. Some single impulse creaks through them, pouring out its breath through the chimneys, scattering itself over the fields, closing itself in behind the doors. It is one great, vague, inchoate organism, scarcely feeling its pulse as yet, rolling in the belly of the world, waiting its hour of birth. Earth is heaped about it; still it eats the earth away, red covering after red covering, day on day. Now it half timidly peeps out, now withdraws itself again. And ever the sky pours on it heat and rain, and wind, and light, and lightning, and hail, shaping it, making it less frail, more fit to wake and take its place in the world. But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher, covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.