Back Aa

Tarrano the Conqueror

Close

<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2> <h3>Industriana</h3> It must have been two days later when at last we were rescued by the Rhaal patrol and taken to Industriana. Back there in the forest I had suddenly remembered that the mate to the thing I had killed would doubtless be lurking in the vicinity. We fled. Subsisting on what food of the wilds we could find, at last we were picked up and taken to the City of Work. The Great City had been destroyed. Wanton capital of the Central State, we learned now that it lay dead. To outward aspect, unharmed. Fair, serene, alluring as ever it lay there on its shimmering waters; but the life within it, was dead. Refugees—a quarter perhaps of the inhabitants—had escaped; hourly the search patrols were picking them up, bringing them to Industriana. Rescue parties were searching the city, to find any who might still be alive. And out in the forest lay a great pile of ashes, still exhaling a thin wisp of its deadly breath—where Tarrano had created the Black Cloud; lost his captive Elza, but doubtless had escaped himself back to his City of Ice. We found Georg and Maida safe at Industriana. Marvelous city! Elza had never seen it before. She sat gazing breathless as from the air on the patrol vessel, we approached it. The land of this region was a black, rocky soil upon which vegetation would not grow. A rolling land, grimly black, metallic; with outcroppings of ore, red and white and with occasional patches of thin white sand whereon a prickly blue grass struggled for life. Rolling hills; and then places where nature had upheaved into a turmoil. Huge naked black crags; buttes; hills with precipitous black sides of sleek metal; narrow canyons with tumultuous water flowing through them. In such a place stood Industriana. The City of Work! Set in an area where nature lay scarred, twisted in convulsion, its buildings clung to every conceivable slope and in every position. Many-storied buildings—residences and factories indiscriminately intermingled. All built in sober, solid rectangles of the forbidding black stone. A long steep slope from an excavated quarry deep in the ground, ran straight up to a commanding hilltop—the slope set with an orderly array of buildings clinging to it in terraces. Buildings huge, or tiny huts; all anchored in the rear to the ground, and set upon metal girders in the front. Bisecting the slope was a vertical street—a broad escalator of moving steps, one half going upward, the other down. Beside it, a series of other escalators for the traffic of moving merchandise. Cross streets on the hill were spider bridges, clinging with thin, stiff legs. And at the summit of the hill stood a tremendous funnel belching flame and smoke into the sky. To one side of the hill lay a bowl-like depression with a single squat building in its center—a low building of many funnels; and about it the black yawning mouths of shafts down into the ground—mines vomiting ore, broken chunks of the metallic rock coming up as though by the invisible magic of magnetism, hunting through the air in an arc to fall with a clatter into great bins above the smelter. In another place, at the bottom of a canyon roared a surging torrent of river. A harnessed river; plunging into turbines; emerging to tumble over a cascade, its every drop caught by turning buckets spilled again at the bottom. Water pursuing its surging course downward, its power used again and again. The canyon dry at one place near the lower edge of the city, the water all electrified, resolved into piped hydrogen and oxygen. Like a tremendous clock ticking, the water, momentarily dammed back, was released in a torrent to the electrolysis vats. The hissing gases, under tremendous pressure, raised up the heavy-weighted tops of two expanding tanks. Another tick of this giant clock—the gases released, were merged again to water. The tops of the tanks lowered, each in turn, one coming down as the other went up—hundreds of tons of weight—their slow downward pull geared to scores of whirling wheels—the power shifted to dynamos scattered throughout the city. It was the twilight of nightfall when we arrived over Industriana. A thousand funnels and chimneys belched their flame and smoke—the flame tinting the sky with a lurid yellow-green glare, the smoke hanging like a dim blue gauze through which everything seemed unreal, infernal. From the city rose a roar—the myriad sounds of industry mingled by the magic of distance. And as we got closer, the roar resolved into its component parts; the grinding of gears; clicking of belts and chains; whirring of dynamos and motors; shrill electrical screams; the clattering of falling ore; clanking of swiftly moving merchandise, bound in metal, magnetized to monorail cars shifting it to warehouses on the nearby hills. And over it all flashed the brilliant signal lights of the merchandise traffic directors whose stentorian electrical voices broadcasting commands sounded above the city's noises. An inferno of activity. A seeming confusion; yet the aspect of confusion was a fallacy, for beneath it lay a precision—an orderly precision as calm and exact as the mind of the Director of a Signal Tower counting off the split seconds of his beams. An orderly precision—the brain of one man guiding and dominating everything; at his desk alone for long hours throughout the days and nights. A quiet, grey-haired gentleman; unhurried, unharassed, seemingly almost inactive; always seated at his empty desk smoking endless arrant-cylinders. The dominating business brain of Industriana. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2