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"
We did nothing--and yet we paid for it. That's what I cannot
understand."
"Perhaps we are paying," said Elizabeth presently--for her theology was
old-fashioned and simple.
Presently it was time for them to part, and each went to the appointed
work. Denton's was to mind a complicated hydraulic press that seemed
almost an intelligent thing. This press worked by the sea-water that was
destined finally to flush the city drains--for the world had long since
abandoned the folly of pouring drinkable water into its sewers. This
water was brought close to the eastward edge of the city by a huge
canal, and then raised by an enormous battery of pumps into reservoirs
at a level of four hundred feet above the sea, from which it spread by a
billion arterial branches over the city. Thence it poured down,
cleansing, sluicing, working machinery of all sorts, through an infinite
variety of capillary channels into the great drains, the cloacae
maximae, and so carried the sewage out to the agricultural areas that
surrounded London on every side.
The press was employed in one of the processes of the photographic
manufacture, but the nature of the process it did not concern Denton to
understand. The most salient fact to his mind was that it had to be
conducted in ruby light, and as a consequence the room in which he
worked was lit by one coloured globe that poured a lurid and painful
illumination about the room. In the darkest corner stood the press whose
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