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gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.
By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
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