ever to drive his words back in his throat. When it ceased, and only
its echo rang in our ears, the thread of the discourse was broken
for ever, and Barque contented himself with the brief conclusion,
"Oui."

Then we looked around us. We were lost in a sort of town.
Interminable strings of trucks, trains of forty to sixty carriages,
were taking shape like rows of dark-fronted houses, low built, all
alike, and divided by alleys. Before us, alongside the collection of
moving houses, was the main line, the limitless street where the
white rails disappeared at both ends, swallowed up in distance.
Sections of trains and complete trains were staggering in great
horizontal columns, leaving their places, then taking them again. On
every side one heard the regular hammering on the armored ground,
piercing whistles, the ringing of warning bells, the solid metallic
crash of the colossal cubes telescoping their steel stumps, with the
counter-blows of chains and the rattle of the long carcases'
vertebrae. On the ground floor of the building that arises in the
middle of the station like a town ball, the hurried bell of
telegraph and telephone was at work, punctuated by vocal noises. All
about on the dusty ground were the goods sheds, the low stores
through whose doors one could dimly see the stacked interiors--the
pointsmen's cabins, the bristling switches, the hydrants, the
latticed iron posts whose wires ruled the sky like music-paper; here
and there the signals, and rising naked over this flat and gloomy
city, two steam cranes, like steeples.

Farther away, on waste ground and vacant sites in the environs of
the labyrinth of platforms and buildings, military carts and lorries
were standing idle, and rows of horses, drawn out farther than one