'Waiting on--up there,' said he. 'Shall I give them the whole
installation, sir?'

'Oh, I don't think the young lady is quite worth that,' said De Forest.
'Get over Chicago, and perhaps we'll see something.'

In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong
block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.

'That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there's Salati's Statue in
front of it,' said Takahira. 'But what on earth are they doing to the
place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a
little, please.'

We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines--the
cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed
glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on
each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled,
slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky
slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a
third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red
before our astonished eyes.

'It is the Old Market,' said De Forest. 'Well, there's nothing to
prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn't
interfere with traffic, that I can see.'

'Hsh!' said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. 'Listen! They're
singing. Why on the earth are they singing?'