Indeed, the whole world even in its most crowded districts
was filthy with flies and swarming with needless insect life to an
extent which is now almost incredible. A population map of the world
in 1950 would have followed seashore and river course so closely in
its darker shading as to give an impression that homo sapiens was an
amphibious animal. His roads and railways lay also along the lower
contours, only here and there to pierce some mountain barrier or reach
some holiday resort did they clamber above 3000 feet. And across the
ocean his traffic passed in definite lines; there were hundreds of
thousands of square miles of ocean no ship ever traversed except by
mischance.
Into the mysteries of the solid globe under his feet he had not yet
pierced for five miles, and it was still not forty years since, with
a tragic pertinacity, he had clambered to the poles of the earth. The
limitless mineral wealth of the Arctic and Antarctic circles was still
buried beneath vast accumulations of immemorial ice, and the secret
riches of the inner zones of the crust were untapped and indeed
unsuspected. The higher mountain regions were known only to a sprinkling
of guide-led climbers and the frequenters of a few gaunt hotels, and the
vast rainless belts of land that lay across the continental 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.
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