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 that upon the
foreshortened page of […]

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 shall have […]

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,
“Mr. Laurier. […]

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 widened between man […]

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 friend” had been
visiting […]

“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 in English
and partly in Esperanto. Then […]

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 curve which distinguishes […]

“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 […]

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 one […]

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 an hour or so […]