counties, and the multitude of factories and chimneys--the latter
for the most part obsolete and smokeless now, superseded by huge
electric generating stations that consumed their own reek--old
railway viaducts, mono-rail net-works and goods yards, and the
vast areas of dingy homes and narrow streets, spreading
aimlessly, struck him as though Camberwell and Rotherhithe had
run to seed. Here and there, as if caught in a net, were fields
and agricultural fragments. It was a sprawl of undistinguished
population. There were, no doubt, museums and town halls and
even cathedrals of a sort to mark theoretical centres of
municipal and religious organisation in this confusion; but Bert
could not see them, they did not stand out at all in that wide
disorderly vision of congested workers' houses and places to
work, and shops and meanly conceived chapels and churches. And
across this landscape of an industrial civilisation swept the
shadows of the German airships like a hurrying shoal of
fishes....

Kurt and he fell talking of aerial tactics, and presently went
down to the undergallery in order that Bert might see the
Drachenflieger that the airships of the right wing had picked up
overnight and were towing behind them; each airship towing three
or four. They looked, like big box-kites of an exaggerated form,
soaring at the ends of invisible cords. They had long, square
headsand flattened tails, with lateral propellers.

"Much skill is required for those!--much skill!"

"Rather!"