The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-24

 under his feet he had not yet pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The nmttlesS mineral wealth of the arctic and antarctic circles was still buried beneath vast accumula- lions of iTnmemoria1 ice. and the secret riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed unsuspect ed The higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinkling of guide led climbers and the frequenters of few gaunt hotels, and the vast rainless belts of land that lay across the conti- mental masses, from Gobi to Sahara and along the backbone of America, with their perfect air, their daily baths of blazing sunshine, their nights of cool serenity and glowing stars and their reservoirs of deep lying water, were as yet only desolations of fear and death to the common imagination
 And now, under the shock of the atomic bombs, the great masses of population which had gathered into the enormous, dingy, town centers of that period were dispossessed and scat tered disastrous1y over the surround ing rural areas It was as if some. brutal force, grown impatient at last at mans blindness, had with the de- Hberate intention of a encouragement of population upon more wholesome lines, shaken the world. The great in- dustrial regions and the large cities that had escaped the bombs were, be cause of their complete economic col lapse, in almost as tragic a plight as those that blazed, and the country side was disordered by multitude of whn- dering and 1aw1ess strangers. In some parts of tie world famine ragged. and in many regions there was plague. The plains north of India, which had become more and more dependent for the general welfare on the railways and that great system of irrigation canals which the malignant section of the patriots had destroyed, were in state of peculiar distress; whole vii Iages lay dead together, no man heed ing, and the very tigers and partners that preyed upon the emaciated sur vivors craw1ed back infected into the jungle to perish. Large areas of China were a prey to brigand bands
 It is a remarkable thing that no com plete contemporary account of the ex- plosion of the atomic bombs survives. There are, of course. innumerable all
 
 from these that subsequent ages must piece together the image of these deY- astations.
 The phenomena, it must be rernem- bered. changed greatly from day to day, and even from hour to hour, as the exploding bomb shifted it's posi- ton, threw of fragments or came into. contact with water or fresh texture of soil Barnet, who came within forty miles of Paris early in October, is concerned chiefly with his account of the social confusion of the country side and the problems of, his command, but he speaks of heaped cloud masses of steam <saH along the sky to the southwest" and of red glare beneath these at night. Parts of Paris were still burning, and numbers of people were camped in the fields even at this distance watching over treasured heaps of saIvaged loot. He speaks, too, of, the distant rumbling of the explcaion -ssIike trains going over iron bridges
 Other descriptions agree with this; they all speak of the t4continuous rever- berations,' or of the ssGhudding and hammering,' ,' or some such phrase, and they all testify to huge pail Of steam, from which rain would fall suddenly In torrents and amid which lightning played. Drawing nearer to Paris, an observer would have found the sal wage camps increasing in number and blocking up the villages, and large numbers of people, often starving and aiiing, camping under improvised tents because there was no place for them to go. The sky. became more and more densely overcast until at last it plotted out the light of day and left nothing but a dull red glare extraordinarily depressing to the spirit.,' In this dull glare, great numbers of people were still living, clinging to their houses and in many cases subsisting in a state of partial famine upon the produce in their gardens and the stores in the shops of the provision dealers.
 Coming in still closer, the investiga- tor would have reached the police cor don, which was trying to check the desperate enterprise of those who would return to their homes or rescue their more valuable possessions within the 'tzone of imminent danger"
 That zone was rather arbitrarily de fined. If our spectator could have got permission to enter 1t, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by q strange purpltsh red light, and quiver- ing and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio active suh- stance. Whole blocks of buildings were alght and burning dercely, the trembling, ragged flames looking pale and ghastly and attenuated in com parison with the full bodied crimson glare beyond. The shells of other edifces already burnt rose pierced by rows of window sockets against the red lit mist
 Every step further would have been as dangerous as a descent within the crater of an active volcano. These spinning, boiling bomb centers would