And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like
evil spirits, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which
to their seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and
fast fix themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down
with filth, like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems
to them that these are soldiers.

The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty
million slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt
and error, uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning
Will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly
certain that the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose
number and whose misery alike are infinite will transform the old
world.






2

In the Earth