In that south-eastern region of London at that time, and all about where

Cossar and his children lived, the Food had become mysteriously

insurgent at a hundred points; the little life went on amidst daily

portents that only the deliberation of their increase, the slow parallel

growth of usage to their presence, had robbed of their warning. But this

returning citizen peered out to see for the first time the facts of the

Food strange and predominant, scarred and blackened areas, big unsightly

defences and preparations, barracks and arsenals that this subtle,

persistent influence had forced into the life of men.

Here, on an ampler scale, the experience of the first Experimental Farm

had been repeated time and again. It had been in the inferior and

accidental things of life--under foot and in waste places, irregularly

and irrelevantly--that the coming of a new force and new issues had

first declared itself. There were great evil-smelling yards and

enclosures where some invincible jungle of weed furnished fuel for

gigantic machinery (little cockneys came to stare at its clangorous

oiliness and tip the men a sixpence); there were roads and tracks for

big motors and vehicles--roads made of the interwoven fibres of

hypertrophied hemp; there were towers containing steam sirens that could

yell at once and warn the world against any new insurgence of vermin,

or, what was queerer, venerable church towers conspicuously fitted with

a mechanical scream. There were little red-painted refuge huts and

garrison shelters, each with its 300-yard rifle range, where the

riflemen practised daily with soft-nosed ammunition at targets in the

shape of monstrous rats.

232

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth