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The Last War | H. G. [Herbert George] Wells | |
Section 2 |
Page 5 of 6 |
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience. She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous organisation of the War Control.... She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding.... The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control. 'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth. |
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The World Set Free H. G. [Herbert George] Wells |
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