“Now you are making me angry, Maria—now I shall kill you! Why are you letting those hot, salty drops fall down into me? I am clasping you around your breast, but it no longer stirs me. I want your throat and your gasping mouth! I want your hair and your weeping eyes!
“Do you believe you have escaped me? No, beautiful Maria! No—now I shall fetch you with a thousand others—with all the thousand which you wanted to save …”
She dragged her dripping body up from the water. She crawled upwards, over stone slabs; she found the door. She pushed it open and slammed it behind her, peering to see if the water were already lapping over the threshold.
Not yet … not yet. But how much longer?
She could not see a soul as far as her eye could reach. The streets, the squares, lay as if dead—bathed in the whiteness of the moonlight. But she was mistaken—or was the light growing weaker and yellower from second to second?
An impact, which threw her against the nearest wall, ran through the earth. The iron door through which she had come flew from its bolts and gaped open. Black and silent, the water slipped over the threshold.
Maria collected herself. She screamed with her whole lungs:
“The water’s coming in—!”
She ran across the square. She called for the guard, which, being on constant duty, had to give the alarm signal in danger of any kind.
The guard was not there.
A wild upheaval of the earth dragged the girl’s feet from under her body and hurled her to the ground. She raised herself to her knees and stretched up her hands in order, herself, to set the siren howling. But the sound which broke from the metal throat was only a whimper, like the whimpering of a dog, and the light grew more and more pale and yellow.
Like a dark, crawling beast, in no hurry, the water wound its way across the smooth street.
But the water did not stand alone in the street. Suddenly, in the midst of a puzzling and very frightening solitude, a little half-naked child was standing there: her eyes, which were still being protected, by some dream, from the all too real, were staring at the beast, at the dark, crawling beast, which was licking at its bare little feet.
With a scream, in which distress and deliverance were equally mingled, Maria flew to the child and picked it up in her arms.
“Is there nobody here but you, child?” she asked, with a sudden sob. “Where is your father?”
“Gone …”
“Where is your mother?”
“Gone …”
Maria could understand nothing. Since her flight from Rotwang’s house, she had been hurled from horror to horror, without grasping a single thing. She still took the grating of the earth, the jerking impacts, the roar of the awful, tearing thunder the water which gushed up from the shattered depths, to be the effects of the unchained elements. Yet she could not believe that there existed mothers who would not throw themselves as a barrier before their children when the earth opened her womb to bring forth horror into the world.
Only—the water which crawled up nearer and nearer, the impacts which racked the earth, the light which became paler and paler, gave her no time to think. With the child in her arms, she ran from house to house, calling to the others, which had hidden themselves.
Then they came, stumbling and crying, coming in troops, ghastly spectres, like children of stone, passionlessly begotten and grudgingly born. They were like little corpses in mean little shrouds, aroused to wakefulness on Doomsday by the voice of the angel, rising from out rent-open graves. They clustered themselves around Maria, screaming because the water, the cool water, was licking at their feet.
Maria shouted—hardly able to shout any more. There was in her voice the sharp cry of the mother-bird which sees winged Death above its brood. She waded about among the child-bodies, ten at her hands, at her dress, the others following closely, pushed along, torn along, with the stream. Soon the street was a wave of children’s heads above which the pale, raised-up hands flitted like seagulls. And Maria’s cry was drowned by the wailing of the children and by the laughter of the pursuing water.
The light in the neon-lamps became reddish, flickering rhythmically and throwing ghostly shadows. The street sloped. There was the mustering-ground. But the huge elevators hung dead on their cables. Ropes, twisted from ropes—metal, ropes, thick as a man’s thigh, hung in the air, torn asunder. Blackish oil was welling in a leisurely channel from an exploded pipe. And over everything lay a dry vapour as if from heated iron and glowing stones.
Deep in the darkness of distant alleys the gloom took on a brownish hue. A fire was smouldering there …
“Go up—!” whispered Maria’s dry lips. But she was not able to say the words. Winding stairs led upwards. The staircase was narrow—nobody used the staircase which ran by the certain, infallible elevators. Maria crowded the children up the steps. But, up there, there reigned a darkness of impenetrable gloom and density. None of the children ventured to ascend alone.
Maria scrambled up. She counted the steps. Like the rushing of a thousand wings came the sound of the children’s feet behind her, in the narrow spiral. She did not know how long she had been climbing up. Innumerable hands were clutching her damp dress. She dragged her burdens upward, praying, moaning the while—praying only for strength for another hour.
“Don’t cry, little brothers!” she stammered. “My little sisters, please don’t cry.”
Children were screaming, down in the depths—and the hundred windings of the stairway gave echo’s trumpet to each cry:
“Mother—! Mother—!”
And once more:
“The water’s coming—!”
Stop and lie down, halfway up the stairs—? No!
“Little sisters! Little brothers—do come along!”
Higher—winding ever and always higher upward; then, at last, a wide landing. Greyish light from
