And to the south over the hills came vast aqueducts with sea water for
the sewers, and in three separate directions ran pallid lines--the roads,
stippled with moving grey specks. On the first occasion that offered he
was determined to go out and see these roads. That would come after the
flying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officer described them
as a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards wide, each one for
the traffic going in one direction, and made of a substance called
Eadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he could gather, resembling
toughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic of narrow rubber-shod
vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled vehicles, sweeping
along at velocities of from one to six miles a minute. Railroads had
vanished; a few embankments remained as rust-crowned trenches here and
there. Some few formed the cores of Eadhamite ways.
Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleets
of advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistas
northward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. No
great aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only one
little-seeming monoplane circled high in the blue distance above the
Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.
A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to
imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the
villages, had disappeared.
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