Turtle Reader

Chapter XI: The Great Collapse And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war. The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial and scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followed each other very swiftly, so swiftly [...]

He came near to striking an attitude. “We shan’t get to him to-night?” asked Bert. “No, sir!” said Laurier. “We shall have to ride some days, sure!” “And suppose we can’t get a lift on a train–or anything?” “No, sir! There’s been no transit by Tanooda for three days. It is no good waiting. We [...]

Bert was trembling violently. He cleared his throat hoarsely. “I say,” he said, “look here, I–” Nobody regarded him. The man with the flat voice was opening a new branch of the subject. “I allow–” he began. Bert became violently excited. He stood up. He made clawing motions with his hands. “I say!” he exclaimed, [...]

He had thought the things he had seen had been exceptional, conclusive things, that the besieging of New York and the battle of the Atlantic were epoch-making events between long years of security. And they had been but the first warning impacts of universal cataclysm. Each day destruction and hate and disaster grew, the fissures [...]

So Bert fell on his feet again, and sat eating cold meat and good bread and mustard and drinking very good beer, and telling in the roughest outline and with the omissions and inaccuracies of statement natural to his type of mind, the simple story of his adventures. He told how he and a “gentleman [...]

“Good day, sah!” said the old negro, in a voice of almost incredible richness. “What’s the name of this place?” asked Bert. “Tanooda, sah!” said the negro. “Thenks!” said Bert. “Thank you, sah!” said the negro, overwhelmingly. Bert came to houses of the same detached, unwalled, wooden type, but adorned now with enamelled advertisements partly [...]

He decided to abandon the shattered flying-machine. He wandered through the trees for some time, and then struck a road that seemed to his urban English eyes to be remarkably wide but not properly “made.” Neither hedge nor ditch nor curbed distinctive footpath separated it from the woods, and it went in that long easy [...]

“Up!” he said, and attacked that lever again. It came over with remarkable docility, and suddenly the wings seemed to give way in the middle. But the engine was still! It had stopped. He flung the lever back rather by instinct than design. What to do? Much happened in a few seconds, but also his [...]

Was it better to risk a fall over land or over water–such water? He was flapping up above the Upper Rapids towards Buffalo. It was at any rate a comfort that the Falls and the wild swirl of waters below them were behind him. He was flying up straight. That he could see. How did [...]

Chapter X: The World Under the War Bert spent two more days upon Goat Island, and finished all his provisions except the cigarettes and mineral water, before he brought himself to try the Asiatic flying-machine. Even at last he did not so much go off upon it as get carried off. It had taken only [...]