THE WAR WITH THE NEWTS

Karel Čapek

 

 

BOOK THREE

THE WAR WITH THE NEWTS  

1 - MASSACRE ON THE COCONUT ISLES

            In one thing, Mr. Povondra was mistaken: the shots exchanged at Kankesanturai were not the first conflict between people and newts.  The first known skirmish had taken place some years before on the Coconut Isles in the golden age of pirate raids on the salamanders; but even that was not the oldest incident of this sort and in the ports of the Pacific Ocean there was much talk about certain regrettable cases when newts had offered any kind of resistance, sometimes even to the normal S-Trade; although petty incidents such as these are not written about in the history books. 

            On the Coconut Isles, or Keeling Isles, this is what happened: The Montrose, a raiding ship operated by Harriman's Pacific Trade Company and under the captaincy of James Lindley, sailed in for one of its usual newt gathering expeditions of the sort known as a Macaroni Run.  The Coconut Isles were well known for a bay with a large newt population settled there by Captain van Toch himself but which, because of its remoteness, was left, as they say, to its own devices.  No-one could accuse Captain Lindley of any lack of care and attention, not even in that the men who went on shore were not armed.  (At that time the trade in hunting newts had already taken on a standard form; it is true, of course, that the pirate ships had earlier used to equip themselves with machine guns and even light cannons, although they were not intended for use against the newts but against unfair competition from other pirates.  One day however, off the island of Karakelong, one of Harrimans steamers came up against a Danish ship whose captain considered the hunting grounds of Karakelong as his territory; so the two sides settled some old accounts to do with their prestige and some trading disputes by leaving the newts alone and starting to fire at each other with their rifles and Hotchkiss guns; on land, victory went to the Danes after their successful knife attack but the Harriman ship then had its success by firing its cannons at the Danish ship and sinking it with all hands, including Captain Nielsen.  This became known as the Karakelong Incident.  So then governments and officials of the relevant countries had to become involved; pirate ships were from then on forbidden to use cannons, machine guns or hand grenades; the companies involved also allocated what they called the free hunting ground among themselves so that any one newt settlement would only ever be visited by a certain raiding ship; this gentleman's agreement among the great pirates was adhered to and respected even by the smallest raiding businesses.)  But to return to Captain Lindley, he conducted himself entirely in accordance with commercial and marine practices of the time when he sent his men out to gather newts armed only with sticks and oars, and the later official enquiry gave the dead captain full satisfaction in that respect. 

            The men who went down to the Coconut Isles that moonlit night were under the command of Lieutenant Eddie McCarth, who was already experienced in this sort of newt-gathering expedition.  It is true that the herd of newts they found on the shore was exceptionally large, estimated at between six and seven hundred strong and fully grown males, whereas Lieutenant McCarth had only sixteen men at his command; but it cannot be said that he failed to do his duty, partly because the officers and ratings on the pirate ships were paid, it was said, according to how many newts they captured.  In the ensuing enquiry by the marine authorities it was found that "although Lieutenant McCarth is responsible for this unhappy incident it is quite clear that no-one else would have acted differently under the circumstances".  The unfortunate young officer had, in fact, shown remarkable prudence in that instead of slowly surrounding the newts, which, given their numbers, could not have been fully achieved, he ordered a sudden attack with the intention of cutting the newts off from the sea, forcing them inland and stunning them one by one with a blow to the head with a club or an oar.  Unfortunately, when the attack took place the sailors were separated from each other and nearly two hundred salamanders escaped into the water.  While the attacking men were processing those newts which had been prevented from reaching the sea they began to hear shots behind themselves from shark guns; no-one had any idea that these wild and natural newts on the Keeling Isles were equipped with weapons against sharks and no-one ever found out who had given them to them. 

            One of the deck hands, Michael Kelly, who had survived the whole catastrophe, said: "When we heard the first shots we thought it must be some other ship that had come to hunt for newts like we had.  Lieutenant McCarth turned round quick and shouted, 'What are you doing, you fools, this is the crew of the Montrose here!'  Then he was hit in the side, but he still pulled out his revolver and started shooting.  Then he got a second shot in the neck and he fell.  Then we saw for the first time that it was the newts firing at us and trying to cut us off from the sea.  Then Long Steve raised his oar and rushed out at the newts shouting Montrose! Montrose! so we all started shouting Montrose! and thumping at these horrors with oars or whatever we could.  There was about five of us left lying there, but the rest of us fought our way down to the water.  Long Steve jumped in and waded out to the boat; but when he got there some of the newts grabbed hold of him and pulled him down under the water.  They drowned Charlie and all; he shouted to us Lads, Jesus Christ lads, don't let them get me, but there was nothing we could do.  Those vermin were shooting us in the back; Bodkin turned round and he got it in the belly, all he said was Oh no! and he fell.  So we all tried to get back inland to the interior of the island; wed already broken all our oars and sticks on these monsters, so all we did was run like rabbits.  By then, there was only the four of us left.  We didn't dare go any further away from the shore in case we couldn't get back on board ship; we hid behind some stones and bushes and had to look on while the newts finished off our mates.  Drowned them in the water like kittens, they did, and if anyone still tried to swim they gave him one on the head with a crowbar.  It was only then I saw I had a twisted ankle and couldn't run any further."

            Captain James Lindley, who had remained on board the Montrose, must have heard the gunfire from the island; whether he thought there was some trouble with the natives or that there were some other newt traders there, he simply took the cook and two of the stokers who had stayed on board, had the machine gun (which was clearly hidden on the ship despite being strictly forbidden) put on the remaining boat, and went out to help his crewmen.  He was careful not to set foot on the shore; he merely went close in the boat with the machine gun ready on its prow and stood there with folded arms for all to see.  Let us allow Mister Kelly to explain further. 

            "We didn't want to call out to the captain so that the newts wouldn't find us.  Mister Lindley stood in the boat with his arms folded and called out, What's going on here?  Then the newts turned round to look at him.  There was a couple of hundred of them on the shore, and more and more of them kept swimming up from the sea and surrounded the boat.  What's going on here? the captain asked, and then a big newt went up close to him and said, Go back!  The captain just looked at him, he didn't say anything for a while and then he asked, Are you a newt?

            We are newts, said this newt.  Now please, go back!

            I want to see what you've been doing with my men, said the old man.  You should not have attacked us, said the newt.  You will now, please, go back to your ship!  The captain didn't say anything again for a while, and then he calmly said,

             Alright Jenkins, fire!  And Stoker Jenkins started firing at the newts with the machine gun."

            (Later, at the official enquiry, the affair was described in these words: In this respect, Captain James Lindley did no more than we are entitled to expect from a British seaman.)

            "All the newts were together in a group," Kelly's testimony continued, "and so they fell like corn in a field.  Some of them shot at Mr. Lindley with those guns of theirs, but he stood there with his arms folded and didn't even move.  Just then a black newt came out of the water just behind the boat, and it had something in its paw something like a tin can, with its other paw it pulled something out of it and threw it into the water under the boat.  After about five seconds there was a column of water came up and there was a loud bang, but sort of muffled sounding, and we could feel how it made the ground shake under our feet."

            (From Kelly's description, the official enquiry concluded that the newts had used an explosive known as W3, supplied to them for removing rock from under the water at the fortification works in Singapore, but it remained a mystery how it came into the hands of the newts on the Coconut Isles.  There were some who surmised that the explosives were given them by people, others supposed the newts themselves must already have had some long distance communications.  Public opinion clamoured for a ban on giving the newts such dangerous explosives; however the appropriate office declared that there was still no other explosive that was as "highly effective and relatively safe" as W3, and that's how things were left.)

            "The boat flew up into the air," Kelly's testimony continued," and was ripped to pieces.  All the newts, the ones that were still alive, rushed up to the place.  We couldn't really see whether Mr. Lindley was dead or alive; but all three of my shipmates - Donovan, Burke and Kennedy - jumped up and went to help him so that he wouldn't fall into the hands of those newts.  I wanted to run up as well but I had that twisted ankle so I sat where I was and pulled on my foot with both hands to try and get the bones in the right place.  So I don't know what happened next, but when I looked up there was Kennedy lying there face down in the sand and there was no sign at all of Donovan or Burke; there was just still something going on in the water."

            Kelly then escaped deeper into the island until he found a native village; but the natives behaved strangely towards him and were unwilling even to offer him shelter; perhaps they were afraid of the newts.  It was only seven weeks later that the Montrose was found, entirely plundered and abandoned, at anchor off the Coconut Isles by a fishing boat which rescued Kelly. 

            Some weeks later, a British gunboat, HMS Fireball, sailed to the Coconut Isles and spent the night waiting at anchor.  It was once again full moon, and the newts came out of the sea, took up their places in a circle on the sand and began their ceremonial dance.  Then His Majesty's Ship fired its first rounds of grapeshot into them.  Those newts that weren't cut to pieces immediately stiffened and then fled into the water; that was when the six cannons thundered out their terrible salvo and the only newts left were the few that still crawled towards the water on their broken limbs.  Then there was another salvo from the cannons, and then a third.

            When that had ended, HMS Fireball withdrew to half a mile offshore and began to fire into the water as it slowly sailed up and down the coast.  This lasted six hours and used about eight hundred rounds of ammunition.  Then the Fireball sailed away.  Over the following two days, the whole of the sea around the Keeling Isles was covered with the dismembered remains of thousands and thousands of newts. 

            That same night a battleship from Holland, the Van Dijck, fired three rounds into a colony of newts on the island of Goenong Api; the Japanese cruiser Hakodate shot three grenades onto the little newt island of Ailinglaplap; the French gunboat, Bechamel, disrupted the newts dance on the island of Rawaiwai with three shots.  This was a warning to the newts.  It was not in vain; there was no further incident anywhere comparable with the Keeling Killing, and the trade in newts, both organised and freelance, was able to flourish without disturbance and with official blessing.

2 - SKIRMISH IN NORMANDY

            A conflict that took place in Normandy somewhat later had a quite different character.  The newts there, most of whom worked in Cherbourg and lived on the surrounding beaches, had become very fond of apples.  Their employers, though, were unwilling to provide them with anything but the usual newt food (they said it would raise construction costs above the projected budget) and so the newts began to undertake scrumping raids in the nearby orchards.  The land owners complained about it to the prefecture and the newts were strictly forbidden to go anywhere on the beach outside the designated newt area, but this was of no help; the orchards continued to suffer steady losses, eggs seemed to disappear from the chicken coops, and every morning more and more guard dogs were found dead.  So the villagers began to guard their orchards themselves, armed with ancient shotguns, and shot the poaching newts.  It would have remained just a local matter; but the people of Normandy were also annoyed that their taxes had been raised and the price of ammunition had gone up, so they developed a deadly malice towards the newts and undertook raids against them in heavily armed gangs.  When they had shot a large number of newts even while they were at work, the newt's employers complained to the prefecture and the prefect ordered that the villagers should have their rusty old guns taken away.  The villagers of course resisted, and there were unpleasant conflicts between them and the gendarmes; the stubborn Normans were no longer just shooting at the newts but also, now, at the police.  Reinforcements were sent out to Normandy and carried out a house to house search.

            It was just about at this time that there was a very unpleasant incident near Coutances: a group of local lads attacked a newt who, they claimed, had been acting suspiciously near a hen coop.  They surrounded him with his back against the wall of a barn and began to throw bricks at him.  The injured salamander raised his hand and threw down something that looked like an egg; there was an explosion which ripped not only the newt to pieces but also three of the lads: eleven year old Pierre Cajus, sixteen year old Marcel Bérard and fifteen year old Louis Kermadec; and there were also five other children seriously injured to varying degrees.  The news quickly spread throughout the region; about seven hundred people came in buses from all around and attacked the newt colony in the bay of Basse Coutances, armed with shotguns, pitchforks and flails.  Around twenty newts were killed before the police were able to subdue the angry crowd.  Sappers called in from Cherbourg surrounded the bay with barbed wire; but that night the salamanders came out of the sea, destroyed the barbed wire fences with hand grenades and tried to make their way inland.  Several companies of soldiers with machine guns were quickly brought in on lorries and a chain of troops was used to try and keep the newts separate from people.  Meanwhile, the people were attacking the finance offices and police stations and one unpopular tax inspector was hanged on a lamppost with a placard saying: Away with the Newts!  The newspapers, especially those in Germany, talked about a revolution in Normandy; although the government in Paris issued vehement denials. 

            While the bloody skirmishes between people and newts spread along the coast of Calvados into Picardy and Pas de Calais, the ageing French cruiser, Jules Flambeau, sailed out of Cherbourg towards the western coast of Normandy; it was later found that the cruiser was only intended to calm and reassure the local inhabitants and the newts.  The Jules Flambeau dropped anchor a mile and a half from the bay of Basse Coutances; when night came, in order to create a stronger impression, the captain order coloured rockets to be set off.  This beautiful spectacle was watched by a large number of people on the shore; suddenly there was a hissing noise and an enormous column of water rose at the bow of the ship; it keeled over and there was a terrible explosion.  It was clear that the cruiser was sinking; within a quarter of an hour motor boats had come out from the nearby ports to offer help but they were not needed; apart from three men killed in the explosion itself the whole crew was saved and the Jules Flambeau went down five minutes later, its captain being the last to leave the ship with the memorable words, "There's nothing we can do".

            The official report, issued that same night, announced that the "ageing cruiser, the Jules Flambeau, which was anyway to be withdrawn from service within a few weeks from now, hit rocks while sailing by night and, with its boiler exploding, sank", but the press were not so easily satisfied; while the government influenced press maintained that the ship had hit a recently laid German mine, the opposition and foreign press carried headlines such as:

FRENCH CRUISER TORPEDOED by newts!

MYSTERIOUS EVENTS off the coast of Normandy

NEWTS IN REVOLT!

"We call to account," wrote one French member of parliament in his paper, "those who gave arms to the newts that they could use against people; who put bombs in their paws so that they could kill French villagers and children as they play; who gave these monstrosities from the sea the most modern torpedoes so that they could sink French shipping whenever they want.  Let us call them to account, I say: let them be indicted for murder, let them be dragged before a military tribunal for treason, let them be investigated for us to learn how much they profited from supplying the rabble of the oceans with the weapons to attack civilisation!"  And so on; there was simply a general consternation, people gathered on the streets and began to build barricades; Senegalese riflemen, their guns stacked in pyramids, were stationed on the boulevards of Paris, and waiting in the suburbs were tanks and armoured cars.  This was when the minister for marine affairs, Monsieur François Ponceau, stood in parliament, pale but decisive, and declared: The government accepts the responsibility for having equipped newts on French territory with guns, underwater machine guns, and torpedoes.  French newts, however, are equipped only with light, small calibre cannons; German salamanders are armed with 32cm. underwater mortars.  On French coasts there is only one underwater arsenal of hand grenades, torpedoes and explosives every twenty-four kilometres on average, on Italian coasts there are deep-water depots of armaments every twenty kilometres and in German waters every eighteen kilometres.  France cannot leave her shores unprotected and will not do so.  It is not possible for France to simply stop arming her newts.  the minister would issue instructions for the most thorough investigations possible to discover who is guilty for the fatal misunderstanding on the Normandy coast; it seems that the newts saw the coloured rockets as a signal for military action and wished to defend themselves.  The captain of the Jules Flambeau and the prefect of Cherbourg were both removed from their positions; a special commission was set up to ascertain how businesses involved in water works treated their newts with the expectation that that they would come under strict supervision in future.  The government deeply regretted the loss of human lives; Pierre Cajus, Marcel Bérard and Louis Kermadec would be decorated as national heroes, buried at government expense and their parents rewarded with a large sum of money.  Substantial changes were made at the highest level to the way French shipping was managed.  The government put a motion of no-confidence in the National Assembly, to be settled when more information was available, and the cabinet announced that it would remain in permanent session. 

            The newspapers, according to their political colour, urged punishment, eradication, colonisation or a crusade against the newts, a general strike, resignation of the government, the arrest of newt owners, the arrest of communist leaders and agitators and many other protective measures of this sort.  People began frantically to stockpile food when rumours of the shores and ports being closed off began to spread, and the prices of goods of every sort  soared; riots caused by rising prices broke out in the industrial cities; the stock exchange was closed for three days.  It was simply the more worrying and dangerous than it had been at any time over the previous three or four months.  But this was when the minister for agriculture, Monsieur Monti, stepped dexterously in.  He gave orders that several hundred loads of apples for the newts should be discharged into the sea twice a week along the French coasts, at government cost, of course.  This measure was remarkably successful in pacifying both the newts and the villagers in Normandy and elsewhere.  But Monsieur Monti went even further: there had long been deep and serious disturbances in the wine-growing regions, resulting from a lack of turnover, so he ordered that the state should provide each newt with a half litre of white wine per day.  At first the newts did not know what to do with this wine because it caused them serious diarrhoea and they poured it into the sea; but with a little time they clearly became used to it, and it was noticed that from then on the newts would show a lot more enthusiasm for sex, although with lower fertility rates than before.  In this way, problems to do with the newts and with agriculture were solved in one stroke; fear and tension were assuaged, and, in short, the next time there was another government crisis, caused by the financial scandal around Madame Töppler, the clever and well proven Monsieur Monti became the minister for marine affairs in the new cabinet. 

3 - INCIDENT IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

            Not long afterwards, a Belgian ferry, the Oudenbourg, was steaming its way from Ostende to Ramsgate.  In the straits of Dover the duty officer noticed that half a mile south of its usual course there was something going on in the water.  He could not be sure that there was no-one drowning there and so he ordered a change of course down to where the perturbance was taking place.  Two hundred passengers on the windward side of the ship were shown a very strange spectacle: in some places a vertical jet of water shot out from the surface, and in some of those vertical jets there could be seen something like a black body thrown up with it; the surface of the sea for one or two hundred yards all around was tossing and seething wildly while, from the depths, a loud rattling and humming could be heard.  "It was as if there was a small volcano erupting under the sea."  As the Oudenbourg slowly approached the place an enormous wave rose about ten yards ahead of it and a terrible noise thundered out like an explosion.  The entire ship was lifted violently and the deck was showered with a rain of water that was nearly boiling hot; and landing on the deck with the water was a strong black body which writhed and let out a sharp loud scream; it was a newt that had been injured and burnt.  The captain ordered the ship full steam astern so that the ship would not steam straight into the middle of this turbulent Hell; but the water all around had also begun to erupt and the surface of the sea was strewn with pieces of dismembered newts.  The ship was finally able to turn around and it fled northwards as fast as possible.  Then there was a terrible explosion about six hundred yards to the stern and a gigantic column of water and steam, perhaps a hundred yards high, shot out of the sea.  The Oudenbourg set course for Harwich and sent out a radio warning in all directions: "Attention all shipping, attention all shipping!  Severe danger on Ostende-Ramsgate lane.  Underwater explosion.  Cause unknown.  All shipping advised avoid area!"  All this time the sea was thundering and boiling, almost as if military manoeuvres had been taking place under the water; but apart from the erupting water and steam there was nothing to see.  From both Dover and Calais, destroyers and torpedo boats set out at full steam and squadrons of military aircraft flew to the site of the disturbance; but by the time they got there all they found was that the surface was discoloured with something like a yellow mud and covered with startled fish and newts that had been torn to pieces.  At first it was thought that a mine in the channel must have exploded; but once the shores on both sides of the Straits of Dover had been ringed off with a chain of soldiers and the English prime-minister had, for the fourth time in the history of the world, interrupted his Saturday evening and hurried back to London, there were those who thought the incident must be of extremely serious international importance.  The papers carried some highly alarming rumours, but, oddly enough, this time remained far from the truth; nobody had any idea that Europe, and the whole world with it, stood for a few days on the brink of a major war.  It was only several years later that a member of the then British cabinet, Sir Thomas Mulberry, failed to be re-elected in a general election and published his memoirs setting out just what had actually happened; but by then, though, nobody was interested.

            This, in short, is what happened: Both England and France had begun constructing underwater fortresses for the newts in the English Channel.  By means of these fortresses it would have been possible, in case of war, to close it off to shipping entirely.  Then, of course, both great powers accused the other of having started it first; but in all probability both sides began fortification at the same time in the fear that the friendly neighbour across the channel might get there before they did.  In short, two enormous concrete fortresses  armed with heavy cannons, torpedoes, extensive minefields and all that modern weapon technology could give them, had been growing steadily under the surface of the Straits of Dover; on the English side this terrible fortress of the deep was operated by two divisions of heavy newts and around thirty thousand working salamanders, on the French side there were three divisions of first class warrior newts.  It seems that on the critical day, a working colony of British newts came across French salamanders on the seabed in the middle of the strait and some kind of misunderstanding developed.  The French insisted that their newts had been working peacefully when they were attacked by the British who wanted to repel them, that British armed newts had tried to abduct some French newts who, of course, had defended themselves.  At this, British military salamanders began firing into French labouring newts with hand grenades and mortars so that the French newts were forced to use similar weapons.  The government of France felt compelled to require full satisfaction from His Britannic Majesty's government and complete withdrawal from the disputed area of the seabed in order to ensure that no similar incident would occur again in the future. 

            On the other hand, the British government sent a special note to the government of the French Republic informing them that French militarised newts had entered the English half of the channel and were about to lay down mines there.  The British newts pointed out that they were in their working area; at which the French salamanders, armed to the teeth, responded by throwing hand grenades which killed several working newts on the British side.  It was with regret that His Majesty's Government felt obliged to require full satisfaction from the government of the French Republic and the assurance that French military newts would never again enter the British side of the English Channel.

            At this the French government declared that it could no longer tolerate having a neighbouring state building underwater fortifications in immediate proximity to the French coast.  As far as a misunderstanding on the bed of the English Channel was concerned the republic suggested that, in accordance with the London Convention, the dispute be presented to the international court in The Hague.  The British government replied that it could not and would not subject the security of British coasts to decisions made by any external body.  As victims of the French attack they once again required, and with all possible emphasis, an apology, payment for damages and a guarantee for the future.  British shipping stationed at Malta steamed westward at full speed; the Atlantic fleet was given orders to assemble at Portsmouth and Yarmouth.

            The French government ordered the mobilisation of its naval reserve.

            It now seemed that neither side could give way; it clearly meant after all nothing less than mastery over the entire channel.  At this critical moment Sir Thomas Mulberry discovered the surprising fact that there actually were no working newts or military newts operating on the English side, or at least not officially, as the British Isles were still bound by Sir Samuel Mandeville's prohibition on any salamander working on British coasts or surface waters.  This meant that the British government could not officially maintain that French newts had attacked any English newts; the whole issue therefore was reduced to the question whether French newts, deliberately or in error, had crossed over into British sovereign waters.  French officials promised that they would investigate the matter; the English government never even suggested that the matter should be presented to the international court in The Hague.  Finally the British admiralty came to an agreement with the French admiralty that there would be a five kilometre wide neutral zone between underwater fortifications in the English Channel, and in this way the exceptional friendliness existing between the two states was confirmed. 

4 - THE NORTHERN NEWT

            Not many years after the first newt colonies had been settled in the North Sea and the Baltic a German scientist, Dr. Hans Thüring, found that the Baltic newt had certain distinctive physical features - clearly as a result of its environment; that it was somewhat lighter in colour, it walked on two legs, and its cranial index indicated a skull that was longer and narrower than other newts.  This variety was given the name Northern Newt or Noble Newt (Andrias Scheuchzeri var. nobilis erecta Thüring). 

            The German press took this Baltic newt as its own, and enthusiastically stressed that it was because of its German environment that this newt had developed into a different and superior sub-species, indisputably above the level of any other salamander.  Journalists wrote with contempt of the degenerate newts of the Mediterranean, stunted both physically and mentally, of the savage newts of the tropics and of the inferior, barbaric and bestial newts of other nations.  The slogan of the day was From the Great Newt to the German Übernewt.  And what had been the origin of all the latter day newts on German soil?  Had its glorious miocene skull not been found in Öhningen by the learned German Doctor Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer?  There was therefore not the slightest doubt that the original Andrias Scheuchzeri had had its origin in the geological past on German soil; its migration to other seas and climatic zones was something it had had to pay for with its decline and degeneration; but as soon as it found itself back on the soil of its homeland it once again became what it had been in the past: the noble northern Scheuchzer Newt, light in colour, erect in gait and long in skull.  It was only on German soil that newts could return to their pure and highest form, such as it had been found by the great Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer from the impression in the quarry at Öhningen.  This was why Germany needed new and longer shores, it needed colonies, it needed the seas of the world so that a new generation of racially pure, original German salamanders could develop in German waters.  We need new living room for our newts, wrote the German newspapers; and so that this fact was always present to the German eyes a grand memorial to Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer was set up in Berlin.  The great doctor was depicted with a thick book in his hand; at his sits the erect and noble Nordic newt, gazing into the distance towards the boundless shores of the worlds oceans.  There was, of course, a celebratory speech given at the unveiling of this national monument, and it attracted the attention of newspapers all around the world.  A New Threat from Germany, asserted, in particular, the press in England.  We have become used to this sort of tone but if, on an official occasion such as this, we are told that Germany is in need of five thousand kilometres of new coastline within three years we have to choice but to give a clear response: Just You Try It!  See what happens if you encroach on British shores.  We are prepared, and in three years time we will be even better prepared.  England must have - and will have - a navy as large as the two biggest continental powers put together; this relation of power cannot ever be changed.  Anyone who wishes to unleash an insane arms race in naval weaponry is welcome to try; no Briton will ever allow his country to fall a single step behind.

            "We accept the challenge laid down by the Germans," declared the first lord of the admiralty, Sir Francis Drake, in parliament and speaking on behalf of the government.  "Whoever tries to lay a hand on any of the worlds oceans will have to find himself facing the might of our ships.  The British Empire is strong enough to repel any assault on its outposts or the shores of its colonies and dominions.  The construction of new land, island, fortress or airbase in any sea will be considered an attack of this sort if its waves wash onto coastline under British dominion, however tiny.  Let this be the last warning to anyone who might wish to change the outline of the world's seas, even if by no more than a yard."  In response, parliament allowed the construction of new warships at a preliminary cost of half a million pounds sterling.  It was indeed an impressive response to the construction of the provocative memorial to Johannes Jakob Scheuchzer in Berlin; this memorial had cost no more than twelve thousand reichsmark.

            The outstanding French publicist, the Marquis de Sade, who was always well informed, responded to this speech in this way: The British first lord of the admiralty declares that Great Britain is ready for any eventuality.  That is all well and good, but is the noble lord aware that Germany has a standing army of heavily armed newts in the Baltic, currently comprising five million professional salamander soldiers, who are ready to engage in military action at any time on land or sea?  On top of that must be considered the seventeen million newts engaged in technical and supportive functions who act as a reserve and are ready, at any time, to become an army of occupation?  The Baltic salamander is presently the greatest soldier in the world; trained to the perfect mentality, it sees war is its proper vocation and the most noble; it enters every battle with the enthusiasm of a fanatic, with cool technical planning and the awful discipline of Prussia.

            And is the British First Lord of the Admiralty moreover aware that Germany is frantically building new transport ships, any one of which can carry a whole brigade of warrior salamanders?  Is he aware that hundreds and hundreds of small submarines are being built with a range of three to five thousand kilometres and whose crew will consist of Baltic newts?  Is he aware that gigantic underwater fuel depots are being established in various places?  So now, let us ask the question once again: can the British citizen be certain that his great country really is well prepared for any eventuality?

            It is not difficult to imagine, the Marquis de Sade continued, what a difference could be made to the outcome the next war by newts blockading the coasts and equipped with underwater howitzers, mortars and torpedoes; by my faith, this is the first time in history that no-one need envy the English in their splendid isolation surrounded by water.  And while we are addressing these questions: is the British admiralty aware also that the Baltic newts are equipped with a new, normally peaceful, apparatus called the pneumatic drill which is capable of drilling ten metres deep into the best Swedish granite in an hour and can penetrate fifty or sixty metres deep into English chalk in the same time?  (This was ascertained by secret experiments carried out at night by the German technical expedition on the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth of last month on the English coast between Hythe and Folkestone right under the nose of Dover Castle.)  I suggest that our friends across the channel calculate for themselves how many weeks it would take for Kent or Essex to be drilled through below sea level like a piece of Swiss cheese.  Until now, the Englishman on his island has always looked anxiously to the horizon as the place from which any harm to his flourishing cities, his Bank of England or his warm cottage, so cosy in its evergreen coat of ivy, might come. But now he had better put his ear to the ground where his children are playing: might he not hear, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, a digging and a scraping as, step by step, the newts with these tireless and fearsome drills grind their way deeper to create the paths for laying hitherto unknown explosives.  The last word of the age we live in is not war in the air, it is war beneath the water and the land.  We have heard the self confident words from the commanders of proud Albion; the ship of Albion today is still a vessel of great power, borne on the waves and master of them; but there might come a day when the waves will close over a vessel that has been broken and send it down to the depths of the ocean.  Would it not be better to face this danger sooner rather than later?  Within three years it will be too late!

            The Marquis de Sade was a brilliant publicist, and his warning caused great consternation in England; despite all the denials, people in every part of England were able to hear the newts drilling into the ground beneath their feet.  Officials in Germany, of course, issued a categorical denial and repudiated the Marquis' speech, declaring that from start to finish it was no more than provocation and hostile propaganda; at the same time, however, combined manoeuvres were taking place in the Baltic involving the German navy, land forces and warrior newts; squads of sapper newts, in full view of foreign military attachés, under-drilled and blew up six square kilometres of sand dunes near Rügenwald.  It was said to be a wonderful spectacle when, with a terrifying roar, the ground rose up and an enormous wall of steam, sand and tree trunks flew skywards; it became as dark as night, and the sand that had been thrown up was scattered over a radius of nearly fifty kilometres, even as far away as Warsaw there was still a sandy rain falling several days later.  This enormous explosion left so much fine sand and dust suspended in the atmosphere that all through the rest of that year the sunsets throughout Europe were exceptionally beautiful, coloured a bloody red, and fiery like never before.  The sea created after this piece of coast had been blown away was later given the name the Scheuchzer See, and it was the destination for countless school trips for German children singing their favourite newt anthem, Solche Erfolche erreichen nur deutsche Molche. 

5 - WOLF MEYNERT WRITES HIS OEUVRE

            It may have been just those tragically glorious sunsets that inspired the lone philosopher, Wolf Meynert, to write his monumental work, The Decline and Fall of Man.  We can easily imagine him as he ambles along the shore, his hair loose and his raincoat flapping in the wind, gazing enthralled at the sky that has turned into a blaze of fire and blood.  "Yes," he mutters absent mindedly, "yes, now is the time to write the afterword to the history of mankind!"  And so he wrote it. 

            The tragedy of the human race has reached its final curtain, Wolf Meynert began.  Despite mans lust for enterprise and technical prosperity, all this is no more than the lurid red on the face of an organism already condemned to die.  Man has never before come face to face with such an elevated conjuncture in the life of his species than today; but find me one man who is happy; show me the class that lives in contentment, the nation that does not fear its existence under threat.  In the midst of all the gifts of civilisation, in the rich luxury of material and spiritual property we are all of us falling inexorably into doubt, anguish and unease.  Thus Wolf Meynert went on, with irrefutable logic, to analyse the spiritual state of the modern word, this mix of fear and uncertainty, mistrust and megalomania, cynicism and pettiness: in a word, Wolf Meynert concluded, desperation.  Typical portents of the end.  Moral agony.

So the question is: When was man ever capable of happiness?  Individuals, yes, just like any other living thing; but mankind, never.  The whole of mans misfortunes arise because he had to become human, or that he became human too late when he was already incorrigibly differentiated into nations and races and faiths and classes and factions and rich and poor and educated and uneducated and lords and slaves.  If you take horses, wolves, sheep, cats, foxes, deer, bears and goats, and you herd them into one fold and force them to live in this nonsensical mix-up that you call the Rules of Society and force them to observe these rules, then the result will be unhappiness, discontent and death, a society where not even a divine being could feel at home.  That is a more or less precise depiction of the big and hopeless heterogenous herd that we call mankind.  Nations, classes, factions cannot all live together in the long term without causing each other worries and getting in each others way until it becomes unbearable; they can all live separated from each other - which was only possible for as long as the world was big enough for them - or they can live against each other, in a struggle of life and death.  Biological entities such as race, nation and class have only, where people are concerned, one natural road to take, and that is towards a homogenous and undisturbed bliss; to make a place for themselves and annihilate the others.  And that is just what the human race failed to do in time.  Now it is too late.  We have set up too many doctrines and obligations for ourselves with which we protect these "others" instead of getting rid of them; we have thought up a code of morals, human rights, contracts, laws, equality, humanity and all the rest; we have created a fictitious mankind which includes ourselves and these "others" in some imaginary higher unit.  What a fatal mistake!  We have set our law of morals above the laws of biology.  We have violated the great natural assumption of all societies; that only a homogenous society can be a happy society.  And this attainable prosperity is something that we have sacrificed to a great but impossible dream: the creation of one mankind and one social and moral code for all people, nations, classes and factions.  Grandiose stupidity.  In its way it was man's only honourable attempt to rise above himself.  And now he has to pay for this supreme idealism with his own inevitable end. 

            The process by which man tries to organise himself in society is as old as civilisation itself, as old as the first laws and the first communities; after all these millennia, all that he has attained is the deepening of the gulf between races, nations and classes; world opinions have dug themselves deep and firm in the bottomless pit that we see today, and we cannot fail to see that mans unfortunate and historic attempt to make all peoples into one mankind has definitively and tragically collapsed.  We are finally beginning to realise it; and that is why there are these plans and efforts to unite human society in a different way, a radical way, the way of making room just for one nation, just for one class or just for one faith.  But who can say how deeply we have already been infected with the incurable disease of differentiation?  Sooner or later, every supposedly homogenous unit inevitably breaks back down into a disparate jumble of various interests, parties, classes and so on, who will either persecute each other or will suffer together in silence.  There is no way out.  We are caught in a vicious circle; but history will not continue going round in circles forever.  Nature herself has taken care of that by creating a place on Earth for the newts. 

            It is by more than mere chance, Wolf Meynert went on, that the newts have burgeoned just at the time when mans chronic disease, this badly assembled and quickly decaying super-organism, will progress into agony.  With few insignificant exceptions, the newts are the only homogenous and large-scale unit; they have so far failed to create any deep distinctions of race, language, nation, state, faith class or caste; there are no masters and slaves among them, no freemen and serfs, no rich and poor; differences have been imposed upon them by their type of work, but for their own perceptions they are of one family, a monolith, of one seed, in all their parts they have the same primitive biology, the same poor natural endowments, the same burdens, and the same low living standard.  The last Negroes and Eskimos have incomparably higher living conditions, enjoy infinitely richer property both materially and culturally, than these billions of civilised newts.  And there is not even any indication of suffering among the newts.  On the contrary.  What we see is that they have no need of any of the things with which man seeks escape and relief from the worries of his life or the horrors of his metaphysics; they survive adequately without philosophy, without life after death and without art; they do not know what are fantasy, humour, mysticism, game-playing or dreams; they go through life simply as realists.  They are as remote from man as ants or herrings; and they distinguish themselves from ants and herrings only by having moved over into the environment of another species, the civilisation of man.  There they have settled themselves just as dogs have settled into mans shelter; they cannot live without it, but they do not cease to be what they are; a very primitive and little differentiated type of animal.  All they wish to do is live and multiply; they might even be happy, for there is no sense of inequality to disturb them.  They are simply homogenous.  For this reason they might one day, indeed one day very soon, find no difficulty in doing that which has escaped the efforts of man: to disperse their species with its unity intact all around the globe, a single global community, in a word, universal newtdom.  This day will see the end of millennia of agony for the human genus.  Our planet will not have enough room for two faction, both of which strive to dominate the whole world.  One of them must give way.  We know already which that will be. 

            Distributed around the globe today are around twenty thousand million civilised newts, which is about ten times more than all people put together; it is both a matter of historical logic and biological necessity that the newts that man has subjugated will some day free themselves; that being homogenous they will unite; and that thus having become the greatest power the world has ever seen they will take over.  Could anyone be such a fool as to think they would then spare mankind?  Could anyone think they will repeat the mistake, made again and again throughout history, of exploiting the defeated nations and classes instead of just annihilating them?  Would it be in their interest to keep establishing new differences between men so that then, simply through generosity and idealism, they would try to overcome them?  No, this is a historic error that the newts will not commit, declared Wolf Meynert, if only because they will have been warned in this book!  They will be the inheritors of the whole of human civilisation; all that we have done or attempted to do in our efforts to shape the world will simply fall into their laps;  but if they tried to include ourselves with this legacy, they would be acting against their own interests.  They must rid themselves of mankind if they wish to maintain their own uniformity.  If they failed to act thus they would they would create, sooner or later, their own destructive tendency among themselves: they would create differences and they would have to endure them.  But this is something of which we should have no fear; there is today no creature that will continue the history of mankind that would repeat his suicidal madness.

            There is no doubt that the world of the newts will be happier than that of mankind; it will be unified, homogenous and governed everywhere in the same spirit.  Newt will not be distinct from newt by language, opinion, faith or his requisites for life.  There will be no differences among them of culture or class, merely the allocation of tasks.  No-one will be master or slave, as all will serve just one Great Newt Whole which will be god, government, employer and spiritual leader.  There will be just one nation and just one class.  The world will be better and more perfect than ours will have been.  This is the only possible Brave New World.  Let us therefore make room for it; man is facing his expiry, and there is no more that he can do than to hasten his end with tragic beauty, that is, if it is not too late even for that.

            Now lets express the views of Wolf Meynert in a way that is more accessible: we are aware that in this way it will lose a lot of its force and its depth, which was so fascinating for the whole of Europe in its time.  The young were especially fascinated and adopted a faith in the decline and annihilation of mankind with great enthusiasm.  The German Reich banned the teaching of the great pessimist for a number of political reasons and Wolf Meynert had to flee into Switzerland, but the whole of the educated world was nonetheless content to adopt Meynert's theories about the end of mankind; his book, 632 pages long, was published in all the languages of the world and many millions of copies were distributed, even among the newts. 

6 - X GIVES HIS WARNING

            It may have been as a result of this prophetic book that the literary and artistic avant garde in all the cultural centres declared, After Us, the Salamanders!, The Future belongs to the Newts, Newts Mean Cultural Revolution.  Even if they don't have their own art (they explained) at least they are not burdened with idiotic ideals, dried up traditions and all the rigid and boring things taught in schools and given the name of poetry, music, architecture, philosophy and culture in any of its forms.  The word culture is senile and it makes us sick.  Human art has been with us for too long and is worn-out and if the newts have never fallen for it we will make a new art for them.  We, the young, will blaze the path for a new world of salamandrism:  we wish to be the first newts, we are the salamanders of tomorrow!  And so the young poetic movement of salamandrism was born, triton - or tritone - music was composed and pelagic painting, inspired by the shape world of jellyfish, fish and corals, made its appearance.  There were also the water regulating structures made by the newts themselves which were discovered as a new source of beauty and dignity.  We've had enough of nature, the slogans went; bring on the smooth, concrete shores instead of the old and ragged cliffs!  Romanticism is dead; the continents of the future will be outlined with clean straight lines and re-shaped into conic sections and rhombuses; the old geological must be replaced with a world of geometry.  In short, there was once again a new trend that was to be the thing of the future, a new aesthetic sensation and new cultural manifestoes; anyone who failed to join in with the rise of salamandrism before it was too late felt bitterly that he had missed his time, and he would take his revenge by making calls for the purity of mankind, a return to the values of the people and nature and other reactionary slogans.  A concert of tritone music was booed off the stage in Vienna, at the Salon des Indépendents in Paris a pelagic painting called Capriccio en Bleu was slashed by an unidentified perpetrator; salamandrism was simply victorious, and its rise was unstoppable.

            Needless to say, there was no shortage of those who were opposed to this change and stood against "newtmania" as it was called.  The most fundamentalist piece of opposition came in the form of an anonymous pamphlet that came out in England under the title X Gives his Warning.  The leaflet enjoyed wide circulation, but the identity of its author was never established; there were many who thought it must have been written by some high official in the church, swayed by the observation that X is an abbreviation for Christ.

            In the first chapter the author tried to use statistics about the newts, apologising at the same time for the inaccuracy of the figures he was using.  The estimated total number of salamanders at this time ranged between seven and twenty times the total number of people on the Earth.  It was just as uncertain how many factories, oil wells, weed plantations, and eel farms the newts had under the sea making use of water power and other natural sources of energy; there were not even any estimates of the newts industrial manufacturing capacity; least of all did anyone know how well armed the newts were.  We knew that the salamanders were dependent on people for their metals, engineering parts, explosives and many types of chemical, but not only did every state keep strictly secret how much weaponry and other products their supplied to their newts, but we also knew remarkably little about what the newts did with the materials they bought from people once they were down in the depths of the sea.  One thing that was certain was that the newts did not want people to know these things; over the previous few years so many divers sent down to the seabed had been drowned that it could not possibly be seen as mere chance.  It hardly need be said how worrying this was, both from the industrial point of view and the military.  It is obviously very difficult to imagine, X continued in the following paragraphs, what the newts might want of people, or how much they could simply take.  They cannot live on dry land and there is no way for us to dictate to them what they do under the water.  Our respective living environments are completely and unchangeably separate.  We require a certain amount of work from them, but in return we give them plenty of food and provide them with raw materials and products such as metals that, without us, they would not have at all.  But even if there is no practical reason for any animosity between ourselves and the newts there is, I would say, metaphysical reason: contrasted with creatures of the surface we see creatures of the deep abyss; creatures of the night with creatures of the day; dark ponds of water with bright, dry land.  The boundary between water and land has somehow become sharper than it used to be: our land borders on their water.  We could live perfectly well separate from each other, exchanging no more than certain goods and services, indefinitely; but it is hard to rid ourselves of the fear that that is not how things will turn out.  And why not?  I am not able to give you any precise reasons; but this fear is nonetheless with us; it seems like some kind of intuition that one day the sea itself will turn against the land to settle the question of who lives with whom. 

            I have to admit that this anxiety is somewhat irrational, X went on; but it would seem like a great relief if the newts came out against mankind with some kind of demands.  We would at least then have the chance to negotiate with them, we would be able to make various concessions, contracts and compromises with them; but this silence of theirs is a thing of horror. This incomprehensible reticence makes me afraid.  They might, for instance, wish to ask for certain political advantages for themselves; legislation about the newts is, to put it bluntly, outdated in every state of the world and is not worthy of the dignity of a creature as civilised as the newts nor of a creature so strong in numbers.  There is a need to work out new rights and responsibilities for the newts, and to do so in the way that will be of most advantage to them; their working conditions must be improved and they must be better rewarded for the amount of work they do.  There are many ways in which their circumstances could be improved if only they would ask for it.  Then we would be in a position to make certain concessions and bind ourselves to proper contracts with proper pay; at the very least this would buy time for a number of years.  However, the newts ask for nothing; all they do is raise their output and order more supplies; now is the time when we need to ask where, on both sides, this will all come to an end.  We used formerly to talk about the yellow peril, or black or red; but they were at least people, and we can at least have some idea of what it is that people will want.  But even if we still have no idea how to defend ourselves or even whom we are to defend ourselves against there is one thing that is quite clear: that if the newts stand on one side then the whole of mankind will be on the other. 

            People against newts!  The time has come when it needs to be formulated thus.  It must be said frankly that the normal person has an instinctive hatred of the salamanders, he loathes them - and he is afraid of them.  There is something like a chill veil of horror that has fallen over the whole of mankind.  How else are we to explain this frenetic worldliness, this insatiable thirst for fun and debauchery, this orgiastic abandon that has taken control of peoples minds?  There has never been a comparable collapse of morals since the time when the Roman Empire collapsed under the onslaught of the barbarians.  This is more than the fruit of unprecedented material prosperity, it is the desperation born of suppressed fear and anguish at the thought of our own overturn and annihilation.  Drink deep the last goblet, for tomorrow we die!  What a disgrace, what a punishment!  It seems that God, in His terrible mercy, wishes to allow nations and classes to perish if once they have begun to rush down the road to destruction.  Are we to read mene tekel in fiery letters at the feast of mankind?  Look at the words written in light shining all through the hours of darkness on the walls of our debauched and dissolute cities!  In this way we human beings are already comparable with the newts: we live more by night than by day. 

            If only these salamanders were not so horribly mediocre, exclaimed X in his anxiety.  It is true that they are, to some extent, educated, but this has the effect of limiting them further as all that they have taken from human civilisation is that which is the most commonplace and useful, things that are mechanical and repeatable.  They stand at the side of man like Wagner at the side of Faust; they learn from these books like the human Faust but with this difference, that this is all they want and suffer from no doubts or questions.  The most horrifying thing is that this type of civilised mediocrity, educable but dull and complacent, exists on such a large scale; millions and thousands of millions of individuals all the same; or rather, perhaps I am mistaken, and the most horrifying thing of all is that they have been so successful.  They have taught themselves to use machines and numbers, and they have shown that that is all that is needed to become masters of the world.  All parts of human civilisation that are without purpose, that are playful, fantastic or antiquated, they have ignored; in this way they have ignored all that makes man human, adopting only that which is purely practical, technical and utilisable.  And this pitiful caricature of human civilisation has achieved awesome things; it builds wonders of technology, renovates our old planet and is even a source of fascination of people themselves.  From Wagner, his apprentice and servant, Faust learned the secret of success and of mediocrity.  Mankind has either to engage in an epoch-making conflict of life and death with the newts or he will become like the newts, never to regain his humanness.  As far as I am concerned, X concluded sadly, I would rather see the former. 

            X now gives you his warning, the unknown author continued.  It is still possible to shake off this cold and slimey ring that is wrapped around us all.  We must rid ourselves of the salamanders.  There are already too many of them;  they are armed, we know almost nothing about the power of their weapons and they could well turn them against us; but a danger for us more horrible than mere strength and numbers is the success, nay triumph, achieved by their lack of self worth.  We do not know what it is that we are to fear more; the technology they have taken from human beings, or their sinister, cold and bestial cruelty; but the two of them together create something inconceivably terrifying and almost diabolic.  In the name of culture, in the name of Christianity and mankind we must free ourselves from these newts.  And here he called on an unnamed apostle:

            You madmen, stop feeding the newts!  Stop employing them, eschew their services, let them move away somewhere else where they will feed themselves just like any other sea creature!  Nature herself has already created order in her copious bounty; but only if people - human civilisation and human history - will stop working for the salamanders! 

            And stop providing the newts with weapons, end their supply of metals and explosives, send them no more of the machinery and equipment made by man!  We do not give the tiger his teeth or venom to the snake; we do not stoke the fires of volcanoes or undermine our dams.  Let us ban supplies to any of the seas of the world, let us place the newts outside the law, let them be cursed and banished from our world, let there be a League of Nations to unite us against the newts!  The whole of mankind must be prepared to defend its existence with sword in hand; let the king of Sweden, the Pope of  Rome or a union of nations call a world conference to unite all the civilised states of the world, let us create a united world - or at least a union of all Christian nations - wherewith to oppose the salamanders!  We are today at a turning point.  Under the terrible pressure of the salamander threat, it is possible for man to behave responsibly and create a United States of the World to avoid a world war with all its countless victims.  May God will it!  If it is His will, then the newts will not have come in vain and will have been the instrument of God.

 

            This pathetic pamphlet excited wide support among the general public.  Old women, in particular, agreed that there had been an unprecedented decline in moral values.  On the other hand, the business pages of the newspapers pointed out it would not be possible to reduce the goods supplied to the newts without causing a serious decline in human industrial output and a crisis in many other areas.  Agriculture had come to depend on an enormous demand for maize, potatoes and other crops used for newt fodder; if the number of salamanders was reduced there would be a sharp decline in the market price of foodstuffs which would bring farmers to the brink of ruin.  The trades unions suspected Mr. X was just a reactionary and declared that they would not allow anything that would  impede the supply of goods to the newts; the working man had only just achieved full employment and a proper wage and now Mr. X was wanting to snatch the bread from their hands; the working class is in sympathy with the newts and rejects any attempt to lower their standard of living or deliver them, poor and defenceless, into the hands of capitalism.  As far as any League of Nations against the newts was concerned, they denied that there could be any serious political circumstances when it could be needed; there were indeed both the Society of Nations and the London Convention in which sea-going states bound themselves not to equip their newts with heavy weaponry.  Needless to say, it is not easy to persuade any state to disarm if it cannot be sure that no other seagoing power is not arming its newts in secret and thereby raising its military power at the expense of its neighbours.  Likewise, no state or continent is able to force its newts to move somewhere else, simply because that would have the undesirable effect of raising the industrial and agricultural output, not to mention the military power, of other states and continents.  And objections of this sort, which any thinking person would have to acknowledge, were raised everywhere. 

            Despite all this, the pamphlet, X Gives his Warning, had far reaching effects.  Movements to oppose the newts spread to almost every country in the world and a variety of organisations such as The Association for the Elimination of the Newts, The Anti-Salamander Club, The Committee for Human Protection were established everywhere.  Newt delegates at the thirteenth session of the Commission for the Study of Newt Affairs in Geneva were insulted when they tried to take part. The boards that fenced off the coastline were daubed with threatening graffiti such as Death to the Newts, Salamanders Go Home etc.  Many newts had stones thrown at them; no salamander now dared to raise his head above water in daylight.  But, despite all of this, there was no sign whatever from them of protest or attempt at retaliation.  They were simply invisible, by day at least; and the people who peered through the barriers saw no more than the endless and wearily soughing waves.   "Just look at these monstrosities," they said with hatred, "they won't even show themselves!"

            And it was this tense silence that was suddenly broken by the thunder of the Louisiana Earthquake. 

 

7 - THE LOUISIANA EARTHQUAKE

            On that day, on the 11th. November at one o'clock in the morning, there was a powerful earth tremor felt in New Orleans; some of the buildings in the black areas collapsed; people ran out onto the street in panic, but there was no second tremor; there was only a short, howling cyclone that struck with a sudden furious onslaught, smashing windows and blowing the rooves off the houses where the negroes lived; a few dozen people were killed; and then there was a heavy downpour of mud.

            As the New Orleans firemen went out to help in the worst affected areas, telegrams were tapped out from Morgan City, Plaquemine, Baton Rouge and Lafayette: SOS! Send help! City half destroyed by earthquake and cyclone; Mississippi dam at risk of breaking; send searchers, ambulances, all able-bodied men immediately! - From Fort Livingston there was only this laconic question: Hello, anything happening there?  It was followed by a message from Lafayette: Attention!  Attention! Worst affected New Iberia.  Connection between Iberia and Morgan City seems broken.  Send help there! - Morgan City telephoned in reply: No communications with New Iberia.  Roads and railroads seem destroyed.  Send ships and airplanes to Vermillion Bay!  We need nothing.  Have around thirty dead and hundred injured. - Then a telegram came from Baton Rouge: Received news, worst affected New Iberia.  Concentrate resources New Iberia.  Here need only workers, urgent, dam in danger of breaking.  Doing all possible.  And then: Hello, hello, Shreveport, Natchitoches, Alexandria sending trains with help to New Iberia.  Hello, hello, Memphis, Winana, Jackson sending trains via Orleans.  All vehicles heading dam Baton Rouge. - Hello, Pascagoula here.  Some dead here.  Need help?

            By now fire engines, ambulances and trainfuls of helpers and supplies were on their way to Morgan city - Patterson - Franklin.  It was not until after four in the morning that the first accurate news arrived: Railroad closed by floods between Franklin and New Iberia, five miles west of Franklin; seems deep fissure opened by earthquake, connects with Vermillion Bay and flooded with seawater.  As far as ascertained, fissure extends from Vermillion Bay east-northeast, near Franklin turns northwards, opens into Grand Lake, continues northwards until line Plaquemine - Lafayette, ending in former lake; second branch fissure connects Grand Lake westwards with Napoleonville Lake.  Fissure around fifty miles total length, width one to seven miles.  Epicenter apparently here.  Seems amazing luck fissure missed all major towns.  Loss of life nonetheless substantial.  In Franklin twenty-four inches rain of mud, in Patterson eighteen inches.  Reports from Atchafalaya Bay, sea retreated two miles at time of earthquake, then hundred foot tidal wave.  Feared many dead on coast.  Still no communication with New Iberia.

            Meanwhile a train carrying supplies from Natchitoches entered New Iberia from the west; the first reports, sent by a roundabout route via Lafayette and Baton Rouge, were awful.  The train had not been able to get closer than a few miles from New Iberia because the track had been swept away by the mud.  As people fled from the disaster they reported that a volcano of mud had erupted a couple of miles to the east of the town and instantly drenched the area with a thin, cold rain of it; New Iberia, they said, had disappeared under an onslaught of mud.  All work was made extremely difficult by the dark and the continuing rain of mud.  There was still no direct connection with New Iberia. 

            At the same time, news arrived from Baton Rouge:

thousands of men working on mississippi dam stop if only rain would stop stop need picks shovels trucks workers stop sending help to plaquemine

Dispatch from Fort Jackson:

 

one thirty morning sea wave destroyed thirty houses don't know what it was approximately seventy people swept to sea only now repaired equipment post office destroyed hello wire saying what happened urgent telegrapher fred dalton hello please tell minnie im ok apart from broken hand and loss of clothes but at least equipment ok fred

 

The report from Port Eads was somewhat shorter:

 

some dead burywood swept entirely to sea

 

By about eight in the morning the first aircraft sent to help the affected areas had returned.  The whole of the coast from Port Arthur (Texas) to Mobile (Alabama) had been hit by a tidal wave; ruined or damaged buildings were everywhere.  The south-eastern part of Louisiana (from the road between Lake Charles and Alexandria to Natchez) and the south of Mississippi (as far as the line Jackson - Hattiesburg - Pascagoula) were swamped with mud.  A new bay stretched inland from Vermillion Bay, two to eight miles wide and reaching in on a zig-zag line almost as far as Plaquemine like a long fjord.  New Iberia seemed to have been seriously damaged but many people could be seen digging the mud away from roads and houses.  Impossible to land.  The most serious loss of life likely to have been on the coast.  A steamer, clearly from Mexico, sunk off Point au Fer.  Sea around Chandeleur Islands covered in debris.  Rain easing off over the entire area.  Visibility good.

           

            The first special issue of the New Orleans paper went out at just after four in the morning; as the day went on more issues were published and the details accumulated; at eight in the morning appeared the first photographs of the affected areas with maps of the new inlets from the sea.  At half past eight they printed an interview with the celebrated seismologist from Memphis University, Dr. Wilbur R. Bownell, about the cause of the earthquake in Louisiana.  It's still too early to come to any firm conclusions, the famous scientist declared, but it seems that these tremors have nothing to do with the volcanic activity, which has been so active up till now, in the volcano belt of central Mexico which lies directly across from the affected area.  Today's earthquake seems rather to be of tectonic origin, that's to say it was caused by the weight and pressure of mountains: one the one side there are the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre, and on the other side there are Appalachian Hills on the extensive lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico which continue down to the mouth of the Mississippi.  The chasm that now runs up from Vermillion Bay is only small and insignificant compared with the geological collapse that has already created the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, along with the ring of islands that make up the Greater and Lesser Antilles, which were once a range of mountains.  There is no doubt whatsoever that this subsidence in central America will continue with new tremors, new faults and new chasms appearing; it is even possible that the fault running up from Vermilion Bay is no more than a prelude to the reactivation of the tectonic process with its center in the Gulf of Mexico; and if that is the case we might well be witnesses to an enormous geological catastrophe in which nearly a fifth of the United States might end up as seabed.  But if that really is the case there is a certain likelihood that the ocean bed in the region of the Antilles will start to rise, or it could be somewhat further east where, according to the ancient legends, we might hope to find the sunken city of Atlantis.

            On the other hand, the scientist continued more reassuringly, we need not take seriously any fear of volcanic activity in the affected areas; these craters hurling mud into the air are nothing more than eruptions of natural gas which must have been under the Vermilion fault.  It wouldn't be at all surprising to find gigantic caverns of gas underneath the Mississippi Delta area, and these caverns of natural gas can explode when they come into contact with the air, hurling hundreds of thousands of tons of water and mud into the air as they do so.  But of course, before we can come to any definitive conclusions, Dr. W.R. Brownell repeated, we will need to obtain more data.

            While Dr. Brownell's geological observations on the catastrophe went to press, the governor of the state of Louisiana received this telegram from Fort Jackson:

 

regret loss of human life stop tried to miss your cities but didn't expect retreat of seawater and tidal wave after explosion stop found three hundred forty six human victims along entire coast stop offer condolences stop chief salamander stop hello fred dalton here fort jackson post office three newts just left who came in office ten minutes ago sent telegram holding pistol to my head but gone now vile monsters paid and ran back in water only doctors dog chased them shouldn't let those creatures free in city no other news send love to minnie lacoste fred dalton telegrapher

 

The governor of the state of Louisiana pored long over this telegram.  Some kind of joker, this Fred Dalton, I reckon, he finally said.  Best not to give this to the papers. 

 

8 - CHIEF SALAMANDER MAKES HIS DEMANDS

 

            Three days after the earthquake in Louisiana there was another geological catastrophe announced, this time in China.  The coast of the province of Kiangsu, north of Nanking, about half way between the mouth of the Yangtse and the old bed of the Hwangho, was ripped apart in a powerful, thunderous earthquake; the sea gushed into this fissure and joined up with the great lakes of Pan Yoon and Hungtsu between the cities of Hwaingan and Fugyang.  Apparently as a result of the earthquake, the Yangtse left its course below Nanking and flowed down towards Lake Tai and on to Hang-Cho.  Loss of human life cannot, so far, even be estimated.  Hundred of thousands of refugees are fleeing into the provinces to the north and south.  Japanese warships have been given orders to sail to the affected area.

            Although the earthquake in Kiangsu was far more extensive than the disaster in Louisiana it attracted little attention in the world press  because everyone was used to catastrophes happening in China and the loss of some million lives did not seem very important; and besides, it was scientifically clear that it was only a tectonic earthquake to do with the deep sea trench near the Riukiu and Philippine archipelagoes.  But three days later, seismographs in Europe registered new tremors centred somewhere near the Cape Verde Islands.  More detailed reports stated that the coast of Senegambia, south of St. Louis, had been hit by a serious earthquake.  A deep fissure appeared between Lampul and Mboro, allowing the sea to gush in through the Merinagh and as far as Wadi Dimar.  Eyewitnesses said that a column of fire and steam had erupted from the ground with a terrible noise, hurling sand and stones for miles around; and then there was the sound of the sea as it rushed into the gulf that had been opened up.  There was no significant loss of life.

            This third earthquake stirred up something akin to panic.  Were all the Earths volcanoes becoming active?  the papers asked.  The Earths crust is starting to break up, the popular press declared.  Specialists gave their opinion that the Senegambian gulley may have been no more than the result of a granite eruption by Mount Pico on the Cape Verde island of Fogo; this volcano had erupted as recently as 1847 but since then had been considered extinct.  In this case, the west African earthquake had nothing to do with seismic events in Louisiana and Kiangsu which were clearly tectonic in origin.  But nobody seemed to care whether the Earth was breaking up for tectonic reasons or volcanic.  The fact was that all the churches were filled to capacity that day and in some areas they had to stay open all night. 

            At one in the morning on the 20th. November, radio hams over most of Europe suffered serious interference to their reception, as if a new and exceptionally strong broadcaster was operating.  They located the interference at two hundred and three metres; it sounded something like the noise of machinery or rushing water; then the continuous, unchanging noise was suddenly interrupted by a horrible, rasping noise (everyone described it in the same way: a hollow, nasal, almost synthetic sounding voice, made all the more so by the electronic apparatus); and this frog-like voice called excitedly, "Hello, hello, hello!  Chief Salamander speaking.  Hello, chief Salamander speaking.  Stop all broadcasting, you men!  Stop your broadcasting!  Hello, Chief Salamander speaking!"  And then another, strangely hollow voice asked:  "Ready?"  "Ready."  There was a click as if the broadcast were being transferred to another speaker; and then another, unnaturally staccato voice called:  "Attention!  Attention!  Attention!"  "Hello!"  "Now!"

            A voice was heard in the quiet of the night; it was rasping and tired-sounding but still had the air of authority.  "Hello you people!  This is Louisiana.  This is Kiangsu.  This is Senegambia.  We regret the loss of human life.  We have no wish to cause you unnecessary harm.  We wish only that you evacuate those areas of coast which we will notify you of in advance.  If you do as we say you will avoid anything regrettable.  In future we will give you at least fourteen days notice of the places where we wish to extend our sea.  Incidents so far have been no more than technical experiments.  Your explosives have proved their worth.  Thank you for them. 

            "Hello you people!  Remain calm.  We wish you no harm.  We merely need more water, more coastline, more shallows in which to live.  There are too many of us.  Your coastlines are already too limited for our needs.  For this reason we need to demolish your continents.  We will convert them into bays and islands.  In this way, the length of coastline can be increased five-fold.  We will construct new shallows.  We cannot live in deep ocean.  We will need your continents as materials to fill in the deep waters.  We wish you no harm, but there are too many of us.  You will be free to migrate inland.  You will not be prevented from fleeing to the hills.  The hills will be the last to be demolished. 

            "We are here because you wanted us.  You have distributed us over the entire world.  Now you have us.  We wish that you collaborate with us.  You will provide us with steel for our picks and drills.  you will provide us with explosives.  You will provide us with torpedoes.  You will work for us.  Without you we will not be able to remove the old continents.  Hello you people, Chief Salamander, in the name of all newts everywhere, offers collaboration with you.  You will collaborate with us in the demolition of your world.  Thank you."

            The tired, rasping voice became silent, and all that was heard was the constant noise resembling machinery or the sea.  "Hello, hello, you people," the grating voice began again, "we will now entertain you with music from your gramophone records.  Here, for your pleasure, is the March of the Tritons from the film, Poseidon."

 

            The press, of course, said this nocturnal broadcast was just a "crude joke", some illicit sender; but there were nonetheless millions of listeners waiting at their receivers the following night to find out whether the horrible, earnest and rasping voice would speak again.  It was heard at precisely one o'clock to the accompaniment of a broad howling and hissing like the sound of the sea.  "Good evening, you people," the voice quacked gaily.  "To start tonight's broadcast, we would like to play you a gramophone recording of the Salamander Dance from your operetta, Galatea."  Once the shameless clamour of the music had come to its end the voice once more began its vile and somehow cheerful croaking.  "Hello you people!  The British gunboat, Erebus, has just been torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean after it had attempted to destroy our broadcasting equipment.  The entire crew was drowned.  Hello, we urge the British government to issue a statement by radio.  The Amenhotep, registered in Port Said, was reluctant to deliver a cargo of explosives we had ordered to our port of Makallaha, apparently on the grounds that orders had been given to refuse any further provisions of explosives.  The ship was, of course, sunk.  We advise the government of the United Kingdom to revoke this order by noon tomorrow.  Failure to do so will result in the sinking of the Winnipeg, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, presently underway in the North Atlantic with cargoes of grain from Canada to Liverpool.  Hello, we urge the French government to issue a statement by radio.  You are to call back the cruisers presently underway to Senegambia.  Work to widen the newly created bay there is still in progress.  Chief Salamander has given orders that these two governments should be reassured of his unshakeable friendship towards them.  End of message.  We will now, for your pleasure, play you gramophone records of Salamandria, valse érotique."

            The following afternoon the Manitoba, Winnipeg, Ontario and Quebec were sunk south-west of Mizen Head.  The world was overcome with a wave of horror.  That evening the BBC stated that His Majesty's Government had prohibited any further supplies of food, chemical products, machinery, weapons or metals to the newts.  At one o'clock that night an excited voice rasped out from the radio: "Hello, hello, hello, Chief Salamander speaking!  Hello, Chief Salamander is going to speak!"  And then the tired, croaking and angry voice was heard: "Hello you people!  Hello you people!  Do you believe we would allow you to starve us?  Do not be so foolish!  Whatever you do will be turned against you!  In the name of all newts of the world I call on Great Britain.  With immediate effect, we declare a total blockade of the British Isles with the exception of the Irish Free State.  The English Channel will be closed off.  The Suez Canal will be closed off.  The Straits of Gibraltar will be closed to all shipping.  All British ports will be closed.  All British shipping in whatever part of the world will be torpedoed.  Hello, calling Germany.  Orders of explosives are increased ten-fold.  They are to be made available immediately at the main depot on the Skagerrak.  Hello, calling France.  Orders of torpedoes are to be met forthwith and supplied to underwater forts C3, BFF and Quest 5.  Hello you people!  You have been warned.  If any attempt is made to limit our supplies of foodstuffs they will be taken from your ships by force.  You have been warned."  The tired voice declined to a scarcely comprehensible croaking.  "Hello, calling Italy.  You are to prepare for the evacuation of the territories around Venice, Padova and Udine.  You people have been warned, and warned for the last time.  Any more nonsense from you will not be tolerated."  There was a long pause while nothing was heard but the hissing of the radio like a cold, black sea.  And the gay and quacking voice was heard once more: "And now we will entertain you with gramophone records of one of your latest hits, the Triton Trot."

 

9 - CONFERENCE IN VADUZ

 

            It was an odd sort of war, if indeed it could be called a war at all; as there was no newt state nor any acknowledged newt government which could be officially held responsible for the hostilities.  The first country to find itself in a state of war with the salamanders was Great Britain.  Within the first few hours the newts had sunk almost all British ships at anchor in harbour; there was nothing that they could have done about that.  A number of ships on the open sea were, for the time being, comparatively safe, mainly because they were over deep ocean; in this way part of the Royal Navy was saved and was able then to break through the newt blockade of Malta and gather over the depths of the Ionian Sea; but even these units were soon sought out by the newts in their mini-submarines and sunk one by one.  Within six weeks the United Kingdom had lost four fifths of its total tonnage.  John Bull was given another moment in history to display his famous doggedness.  His Majesty's Government refused to negotiate with the newts and did not call off its ban on giving them any supplies.  "An Englishman," declared the prime minister on behalf of the entire nation, "will protect animals but will not haggle with them."  Just a few weeks later there was a desperate shortage of foodstuffs in the British Isles.  The last few scraps of bread and last few spoonfuls of tea or milk were reserved for the children to consume each day; the British nation bore it with exemplary dignity, despite having sunk so low that they had even eaten all their racehorses.  The Prince of Wales dug the first furrow in the greens of the Royal Golf Club with his own hand so that carrots could be grown there for the orphans in London.  Wimbledon tennis courts were turned over to the cultivation of potatoes, and wheat was sown over the race course at Ascot.  "We can endure the greatest of sacrifices, " the leader of the Conservative Party declared in parliament, "but British honour is something we will never give up."

            The blockade of British coasts was total, and so England was left with only one way of obtaining supplies and maintaining communications, and that was by air.  "We need a hundred thousand aircraft," the minister for aviation declared, and all forces were applied to fulfilling this edict; but then the governments of other European powers raised bitter protests that this would disturb the balance of power in the skies; the government of the United Kingdom would have to abandon its plans and promise never to build more than twenty thousand aircraft and even that not within the next five years.  They would simply have to remain hungry or pay horrifying prices for foodstuffs supplied by the aircraft of other states; a loaf of bread cost ten shillings, a rat sausage one guinea, a box of caviar twenty-five pounds sterling.  This was simply a golden age for business, industry and agriculture on the continent.  All military shipping had been removed at the very start of hostilities, and so the war against the newts had to be carried out on dry land and from the air.  Armies fired into the water with their cannons and machine guns but without, it seemed, doing the newts any serious harm; although the bombs dropped into the sea from aircraft seemed somewhat more successful.  The newts responded by firing on British ports from their underwater cannons, reducing them to piles of rubble.  They even fired on London from the Thames Estuary; then the chiefs of staff tried to attack the salamanders with harmful bacteria, petroleum and acid poured into the Thames and several other bays and estuaries.  The newts responded by releasing a cloak of poisonous gas over a hundred miles of British coastline.  It was no more than a demonstration, but it was enough; for the first time in history the British government was forced to call on foreign powers to intervene on its behalf, citing the ban on the use of poisonous gas in warfare.

            That night, the rasping, angry and heavy voice of Chief Salamander was heard once again on the airwaves:  "Hello you people!  England must stop its foolishness!  If you poison our water we will poison your air.  We use no more than your own weapons.  We are not barbarians.  We have no wish to wage war with people.  All we wish is to be allowed to live.  We offer you peace.  You will supply us with your products and sell us your land.  We are willing to pay you well.  We offer you more than peace.  We offer you trade.  We offer you gold for your land.  Hello, calling the government of Great Britain.  Tell me your price for the southern part of Lincolnshire around The Wash.  You have three days to consider the matter.  For this period I will suspend all hostilities apart from the blockades."

            At that moment the rumbling of underwater cannons off the coasts of England ceased.  The land cannons were also silent.  There was a strange, almost eerie quiet.  The British government declared in parliament that it had no intention of negotiating with animals.  The residents of south Lincolnshire were warned that there was clear danger of a major attack by the newts and that they should evacuate coastal areas and move inland; the trains, cars and buses provided, however, carried only children and some women.  All the men remained where they were; it simply did not enter their heads that an Englishman might lose the land he lives on.  One minute after the three-day truce had expired the shooting began; these were shots from English cannons fired by the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment to the sound of the regimental march, The Red Rose.  There was then the thunder of an enormous explosion.  The mouth of the River Nene was flooded up as far as Wisbech and the whole of the area around The Wash was inundated by the sea.  A number of notable sites collapsed into the water, including the famous Wisbech Abbey, Holland Castle and the George and Dragon. 

            The following day the British government answered questions in parliament: all military measures for the protection of British coasts had been taken; the possibility of further and much more extensive attacks on British soil could not be excluded; that His Majesty's Government was nonetheless unable to negotiate with an enemy which was unwilling even to spare civilians and women.  (Agreement)  This was a time that would not merely determine the fate of England, but of the entire civilised world.  The United Kingdom would be willing to enter into international agreements which would limit these terrible and barbaric attacks which threaten the future of mankind itself.

            Some weeks later, the nations of the world met together in Vaduz.

           

            The conference took place in Vaduz because in the height of the Alps there was no danger from the newts and because most of the world's most powerful and socially important people had already fled there from coastal areas.  It was generally agreed that the conference progressed quickly to reach solutions to all the worlds' current problems.  Every country (with the exceptions of Switzerland, Afghanistan, Bolivia and some other land-locked countries) agreed emphatically not to recognise the newts as an independent military power, mainly because they would then have to acknowledge their own newts as members of a salamander state; it was even possible that a salamander state of this sort would want to exercise its sovereignty over all the shores and waters occupied by newts.  For this reason it was legally and practically impossible to declare war against the newts or put any other sort of international pressure on them; each state would have the right to take measures only against its own newts; it would be a purely internal matter.  This meant that it was impossible to speak of any collective diplomatic or military campaign against the newts.  Any state that came under attack from the salamanders could receive international aid only in the form of overseas loans for them to help defend themselves. 

            At this, England put forward the proposal that every state should at least bind itself to stop supplying the newts with weapons or explosives.  After full consideration the proposal was turned down, mainly because those obligations were already contained in the London Convention; secondly because it would not be possible to prevent any state from providing its newts with equipment and weaponry to defend its own shores "according to its needs"; and thirdly, seafaring nations would "understandably wish to maintain good relations with residents of the sea", so that it was deemed appropriate "not to be precipitate in taking any measure that the newts might feel to be repressive"; every state was nonetheless willing to promise to supply weaponry and explosives to any state under attack from the newts.

            A suggestion put forward by the Colombian delegates in private session, that at least unofficial negotiations with the newts should take place, was accepted.  Chief Salamander was to be invited to send his representatives to the conference.  Great Britain protested loudly at this and refused outright to sit at the same table with the newts; but in the end the British delegation had to be content to depart, temporarily, to Engadin, for reasons of health.  That night, all seafaring powers sent out an invitation to His Excellency Chief Salamander to name his representatives and send them to Vaduz.  The answer was a rasping "Yes; this time we will come to meet you; next time we will expect your delegates to come into the water to meet me."  The official announcement followed: "The accredited newt representatives will arrive in two days time at Buchs station by the Orient Express."

            Every preparation for the arrival of the newts was made with all haste; the most luxurious bathrooms in the city were prepared for them and a special train was chartered to bring cisterns of sea water for the newt delegates to bathe in.  The reception for them that evening at the railway station in Vaduz had been meant to be unofficial, but it was still attended by many of the delegates' secretaries, representatives of government offices and around two hundred journalists, photographers and film makers.  At exactly twenty-five minutes past six the Orient Express arrived at the station and came to a halt beside the red carpet.  From the saloon car emerged three tall and elegant gentlemen with a number of sophisticated-looking secretaries carrying heavy briefcases.  "Where are the newts, then?" somebody muttered.  Two or three officials went forward uncertainly to meet the three gentlemen; but the first of the gentlemen had already begun, quickly and quietly, to say, "We are the newt delegation.  I'm Professor van Dott from The Hague.  Maître Rosso Castelli, avocat de Paris.  Doctor Manoel Carvalho, avocado of Lisbon."  The officials bowed and introduced themselves. 

"So you are not newts, then," the French secretary said with a sigh. 

"Of course we are not newts," said Dr. Castelli.  We are their lawyers.  Excuse me, but I think these gentlemen might want to take some photographs."  And then the photographers and newsreel makers took a great many pictures of the smiling newt delegation.  The secretaries of the legatees already present also showed their pleasure.  It was, after all, only reasonable and proper that the newts should send human beings to represent them.  Human beings were easier to deal with.  And most of all, it would avoid certain social unpleasantnesses.  The first discussions with the newts' delegates took place that same night, addressing the question of how to renew peace with the United Kingdom as soon as possible.  Professor van Dott asserted that there was no question that the newts had come under attack from Great Britain; the British gunboat, Erebus, had fired on the newts radio ship on the open sea; the British admiralty had broken peaceful trading with the newts by preventing the Amenhotep from unloading the cargo of explosives they had ordered; thirdly, the British government had instigated a blockade against the newts by its ban on their receiving any supplies of any sort.  The newts were unable to make a complaint about these hostile acts either at The Hague, because the London Convention denied them the right to make any complaint, or in Geneva, because the newts were not a member of the United Nations; they were therefore left with no alternative but to defend themselves.  Chief Salamander was nonetheless willing to end hostilities under, of course, the following conditions: 1. The United Kingdom was to apologise for the offences cited above; 2. All restrictions on supplies to the newts were to be lifted; 3. As compensation, the newts were to be ceded the lowland areas of the Punjab where they would create new bays and shorelines.  The chairman of the conference stated that he would pass these conditions on to his honourable friend, the representative of the United Kingdom, who was currently unable to attend; however he made no secret of his fear that Britain would find these conditions difficult to accept; but we could all hope that they might be the starting point for further negotiations. 

            Next on the agenda was the complaint by France about the newts having caused explosions on the coast of Sengambia, thus interfering in a French colonial dependency.  This was answered by the famous Parisian lawyer, Dr. Julien Rosso Castelli.  "Prove it!" he said.  Seismographs around the world indicate that the earthquake in Senegambia was of volcanic origin and was connected with volcanic activity in Mount Pico on the island of Fogo.  "Here in this dossier," he declared as he slapped his hand against it, "are all the scientific proofs you need.  If, on the other hand, you have any proof that the earthquake in Senegambia was caused by any activity of my clients, then we await them with interest."

BELGIAN DELEGATE, CREUX: Your Chief Salamander declared himself that it was done by the newts"

PROFESSOR VAN DOTT: His speech was not official.

M. ROSSO CASTELLI: We are authorised by our clients to deny the contents of that speech.  I request that expert witnesses be heard on whether the technology is available to create a fissure in the Earths crust sixty-seven kilometres long.  I suggest they should try the experiment of creating such a fissure.  Unless, gentlemen, you have proof of the opposite, then we will be forced to talk of volcanic activity.  Nevertheless, the bay created in Senegambia would be suitable for settlement by a population of newts and Chief Salamander is willing to purchase it from the government of France.  We are authorised by our clients to negotiate a price. 

FRENCH DELEGATE, MINISTER DEVAL: If this is understood to be an offer of compensation for the damage caused, then we are willing to discuss the matter. 

M. ROSSO CASTELLI: Very well. Although the newt government does request that the contract of purchase cover also the territory of the Landes, extending from the mouth of the Gironde as far as Bayonne, an area covering six thousand seven hundred square kilometres.  In other words, the newt government is willing to buy this piece of land in southern France.

MINISTER DEVAL (native of Bayonne, member of parliament for Bayonne): So that these salamanders of yours turn part of France into seabed?  Never!  Never!

DR. ROSSO CASTELLI: France will come to regret these words of yours, monsieur.  Today we have still been talking of purchase. 

At this, the session was brought to an end. 

The subject of the next meeting was a substantial international offer made to the newts: to cause damage to established and densely populated was unacceptable, but they would be able to build new shores and islands for themselves; in which case they could be assured of substantial loans to cover the costs; the new lands and island would then be recognised as their independent and sovereign territory.

DR. MANOEL CARVALHO, renowned lawyer from Lisbon, offered his thanks for this proposal which he would convey to the newts; but any child could understand, he said, that building new land would take much longer and cost far more than demolishing old land.  Our clients are in need of new bays and shorelines as soon as possible; it is for them a matter of life and death.  It would be better for mankind to accept Chief Salamander's generous offer of buying the world from the human beings instead of taking it by force.  Our clients have found a way of extracting the gold contained in seawater; so that they have almost unlimited means; they would be able to pay for your world very well, very well indeed.  You would do well to bear in mind that, from their point of view, the price of the world will become lower with time, especially if - as might well be expected - any further volcanic or tectonic disasters take place which might well be far larger than anything we have been witness to so far, and these might well substantially reduce the size of the continents.  Today you still have the opportunity to sell the world while it is still its present size; when there is nothing left above water but the ruins of a few mountains no-one will want to pay you a penny for it.  I am here as representative and legal advisor for the newts, and it is my duty to defend their interests; but I am also a human being just like yourselves, gentlemen, and the well-being of mankind is just as close to my heart as it is to yours.  This is why I advise you, indeed I implore you: Sell the continents before it is too late!  You can sell them as a whole or sell them country by country.  Everyone now is aware of Chief Salamander's generosity and modernity; he gives his assurance that in the course of these unavoidable changes to be made to the surface of the Earth everything possible will be done to protect human life; the continents will be flooded in stages and in a way that will avoid any panic or unnecessary catastrophe.  We have been authorised to negotiate either with the this illustrious world conference as a whole or with individual states.  The presence of such outstanding lawyers such as Professor van Dott and Maître Julien Rosso Castelli is your assurance that we are concerned not only to defend the legitimate interests of our clients but will also co-operate closely with yourselves to protect those things that are dearest  to us all; human culture and the good of all mankind. 

            The atmosphere of the conference had become somewhat tense when another proposal was put forward: that the salamander should be allowed to flood and occupy central China; in return for which the newts would bind themselves in perpetuity to stay away from the shores of Europe and its population.

DR. ROSSO CASTELLI: In perpetuity, that is rather a long time.  Let us say for a period of twenty years.

PROFESSOR VAN DOTT: Central China is not a very large area.  Let us say the provinces of Nganhuei, Honan, Kiangsu, Chi-li and Fung-tien.

            The Japanese representative protested at the ceding of Fung-tien which lay in the Japanese sphere of interest.  The Chinese delegate said something, but nobody, unfortunately, was able to understand him.  There was an air of growing anxiety in the negotiating chamber; it was already one o'clock in the morning. 

            Just then the secretary to the Italian delegation came into the room and whispered something into the ear of the Italian representative, Count Tosti.  The count turned pale, stood up, and although the Chinese delegate, Dr. Ti, was still speaking, he called out hoarsely: "Mister Chairman, may I say something.  Reports have just come through that the newts have flooded part of the region of Venice near Portogruaro."

            There was a chill silence, broken only by the Chinese delegate who was still speaking.

            "Chief Salamander did warn you of this long ago," grumbled Dr. Carvalho.

            Professor van Dott turned impatiently and raised his hand.  "Mister Chairman, may we return to the subject at hand.  We were discussing the province of Fung-tien.  We have been authorised to offer the Japanese government compensation for it in the form of gold.  The question following on from that is what our clients would receive from the states concerned for the task of evacuating China."

 

            At that moment, radio hams were listening to the newts broadcast.  "You have just been listening to the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann on gramophone records," the announcer rasped.  "Hello, hello, we are now transferring you to Venice."

            And then, all that could be heard was a black and fathomless soughing, like the sound of rising water.

 

10 - MR. POVONDRA BLAMES HIMSELF

           

            Who would have thought so much time had flowed by?  Our Mr. Povondra isn't even the doorman any more at G.H. Bondy's house; now, you might say, he is a venerable old man who can enjoy the fruits of his old and industrious life in peace as a pensioner; although his pension doesn't go very far these times of high wartime prices!  He still goes out now and then to do some fishing; sitting in his boat with his fishing rod and watching how the water flows by day after day and all the things that go by with it!  Sometimes he hooks a dace, sometimes a bass; there seem to be more of them nowadays, maybe because all the rivers are so much shorter.  Mind you, there's nothing wrong with a nice bass;  It's a bit boney sometimes, but the flesh is nice, tastes a bit like almonds.  And mother knows just how to cook it.  What Mr. Povondra doesn't know, though, is that mother usually uses those newspaper cuttings that he used to collect and arrange for the fire to cook the bass.  He didn't keep up his collection, though, not went he started taking his pension; he got himself an fish tank instead where he keeps some goldfish; and he keeps some little newts in there too; sits there for hours, he does, watching them as they lay in the water without moving, or climbing out onto the little bank he made them with some gravel; then hell turn round and say: "Who'd have thought it, mother?"  But you've got to do more than just sit there and watch, that's why Mr. Povondra took up keeping fish.  Keep yourself busy, you've always got to keep yourself busy, thought Mother Povondra contentedly.  Better than if he went out drinking or got involved in politics.

            A lot of water, truly a lot of water had flowed under the bridges on the Vltava.  Even little Frank isn't at school learning about geography any more, he's not even a young man tearing his socks as he rushes after the silly things young men rush after.  He's getting older himself, young Frank; he's got himself a good job at the post office, he has, so it's turned out quite useful that he did learn all that geography.  He's starting to get a bit of sense too, thought Mr. Povondra as he guided his boat out onto the water by one of the bridges.  Hell be coming round, today; it's Sunday and he won't be working.  I'll take him out in the boat and we can go upstream up to the tip of Střelecký Island; the fish bite better up there; and Frank can tell me all about what's in the papers.  Then we can go back home to his wife and the two nippers - it wasn't long since Mr. Povondra had relaxed into the quiet joy of being a grandfather.  Mind you, it was already a year now since little Marie had started school, she likes school; and there was little Frank, his grandson, nearly weighs five stone already, he does.  Mr. Povondra had a strong and deep feeling that everything was right with the world. 

            But there was Frank waiting on the bank waving to him, and Mr. Povondra rowed over.  "Glad you've come, mind you it's no more than you should do," he added.  "Mind you don't fall in the water now."

            "Are they biting?" his son asked.

            "Not really," the old man grumbled.  "Lets go upstream a bit, shall we?"

            It was a pleasant Sunday afternoon; still not time when those madmen and layabouts all come out from their football matches or whatever else they do.  Prague was empty and quiet; the few people who wandered along the sides of the river and over the bridges weren't in any hurry as they ambled along decently and with dignity.  They were decent reasonable people, not like those crowds who gather and laugh at the fishermen on the Vltava.  Once again, Father Povondra had that nice deep feeling that all was well with the world. 

            "What's in the papers then, Son?" he asked with the curtness of a father. 

            "Nothing much, Dad," his son answered. "I saw that those newts have got up as far as Dresden, though."

            "Germanys had it then," Mr. Povondra asserted. "They're funny people you know, those Germans.  They're well educated, but they're funny.  I knew a German once, chauffeur he was for some factory; and he wasn't half coarse, this German.  Mind you, he kept the car in good condition, I'll say that for him.  And now look, Germanys disappearing from the map of the world," Mr. Povondra ruminated.  "And all that fuss they used to make!  Terrible, it was: everything for the army and everything for the soldiers.  But not even they were any match for these newts.  And I know about these newts, you know that, don't you.  Remember when I took you out to show you one of them when you were only so high?"

            "Watch out, Dad," said his son, "you've got a bite."

            "That's only a tiddler," the old man grumbled as he twitched on his rod.  Even Germany now, he thought to himself.  No-one even bats an eyelid at it these days.  What a song and dance they used to make at first whenever these newts flooded anywhere!  Even if it was only Mesopotamia or China, the papers were full of it.  Not like that now, Mr. Povondra contemplated sadly, staring out at his rod.  You get used to anything, I suppose.  At least they're not here, though; but I wish the prices weren't so high!  Think what they charge for coffee these days!  I suppose that's what you have to expect if they go and flood Brazil.  If part of the world disappears underwater it has its effect in the shops.

            The float on Mr. Povondra's line danced about on the ripples of the water.  How much of the world is it they've flooded so far then?, the old man considered.  There's Egypt and India and China - they've even gone into Russia; and that was a big country, that was, Russia!  When you  think, all the way up from the Black Sea as far the Arctic Circle - all water!  You can't say they haven't taken a lot of our land from us!  And their only going slowly ..

            "Up as far as Dresden then, you say?" the old man spoke up.

            "Ten miles short of Dresden.  That means almost the whole of Saxony will soon be under water."

            "I went there once with Mr. Bondy," Father Povondra told him.  "Ever so rich, they were there, Frank.  The food wasn't much good though.  Nice people, though.  Much better than the Prussians.  No comparison."

            "Prussia's gone now as well, though."

            "I'm not surprised," the old man said regretfully.  "I don't like those Prussians.  It's good for the French, though, if Germanys in trouble.  Give them a chance for some peace, now."

            "I don't think so, Dad," Frank objected.  "They were saying in the papers not long ago how a good third of France is under water now."  Mr. Povondra sighed deeply.

            "There was a Frenchman working for us at Mr. Bondy's, a servant, Jean his name was.  And he was a one for the ladies, ruddy disgrace it was.  See, it always comes back to you if you're not responsible, like that."

            "But they say the newts are within ten miles of Paris," his son, Frank, told him.  "They had tunnels everywhere and then blew the whole place up.  They slaughtered two army divisions, they say."

            "They make good soldiers, the French," said Mr. Povondra with the air of an expert.  "That Jean never used to put up with anything either.  I don't what made him like that.  Smelt just like a perfume shop, but if he got into a fight he really would fight.  But two divisions in the newts' army - that's not much really.  When you think about it," the old man considered, "people were better off when they were fighting with other people.  And it didn't take them all this time either.  It's twenty years it's been going on with the newts, now, and still nothing's happened, they're still making preparations for getting the best positions.  But when I think of when I was a young man, now those were battles!  Three million people there were on one side and three million on the other," and the old man gesticulated and made the boat rock, "and then it was a Hell of a battle when they got together - but they can't even get themselves a proper war these days.  They've always got the same concrete embankments up and never even come together with bayonets.  Not a bit of it!"

            "But newts and people can't go into battle like that, Dad,"  said Povondra junior in defence of  the modern style of warfare.  "You just can't make a bayonet charge underwater."

            "You're quite right," grumbled Mr. Povondra with contempt.  "They just can't get together properly.  But put an army of people against an army of people, and then you'll see what they can do.  And what do you know about war, anyway?"

            "I just hope they don't come here," said Frank, rather unexpectedly.  "When you've got kids, you know ..."

            "What do you mean, come here," asked the startled Mr. Povondra senior.  "What, here, all the way to Prague, you mean?"

            "Not just Prague, anywhere in the country," the worried Povondra junior replied.  "If the newts have already got as far as Dresden then I think ..."

            "You think too much, you do," Mr. Povondra reprimanded him.  "How would they get here?  What, across all these mountains surrounding the country?"

            "They could come up the Elbe and from there up into the Vltava."

            At this idea, Father Povondra snorted in disgust.  "Don't talk rubbish!  Up the Elbe?  They might get some of the way up but not all the way.  It's all rocks and mountains in the way.  I've been there, I've seen them.  Not a bit of it, the newts won't get here, well be alright.  And Switzerland too, they'll be alright too.  It's cause we haven't got any coastline, see, big advantage that is.  It's if your country borders on the sea, that's when your in trouble."

            "But there's sea now as close as Dresden ..."

            "That's Germany, that is," the old man retorted.  "That's their business.  But the newts can't get as far as us, it stands to reason.  They'd have to get all the mountains out the way first; and I don't think you've got much idea how much work that'd be!"

            "Well that's nothing for them," young Mr. Povondra objected gloomily.  "They do that sort of thing all the time!  Think of Guatemala; they flooded a whole range of mountains there."

            "Down there it's different," said the old man confidently.  "Don't talk such rubbish, Frank!  That was down in Guatemala, not here in Europe.  Things are different here."  Young Mr. Povondra sighed.  

            "As you say, Dad.  But when you think that those horrors have already flooded about a fifth of all the land .."

            "Only where it's next to the sea, you daft ha'p'orth, not anywhere else.  You just don't understand about politics.  It's those countries that are next to the sea, they're the ones that have been at war with the newts, not us.  Were neutral, we are, and that's why they can't do anything against us.  That's just how it is.  And now keep quiet for a bit, else we won't catch anything."

            Over the water was peace and quiet.  The trees on Střelecký Island already cast long and delicate shadows on the surface of the Vltava.  Trams jangled over the bridge, nannies pushing prams ambled along the banks, the people out on this Sunday afternoon were gay and friendly ...

            "Dad?" exclaimed young Povondra, almost like a child.

            "What is it?"

            "Is that a catfish there?"

            "Where?"  Out of the river, just by the National Theatre, there protruded a large black head moving slowly upstream.

            "Is that a catfish," Povondra junior said again.  The old man put down his fishing rod.

            "That there?" he exclaimed, pointing at it with a shaking finger.  "That?"  The black head disappeared under the water.  "That wasn't a catfish, Frank," explained the old man in a voice that hardly seemed his own.  "We might as well go home, now.  We've all had it."

            "Had what?"

            "A newt.  That was a newt, they're here.  Lets go home," he repeated as he fumbled to put his rod away.  "We've all had it."

            "You're shaking," said Frank anxiously.  "What's wrong?"

            "Lets just go home," the old man stuttered crossly as his chin quivered.  "I'm cold.  I'm cold.  That's all we needed!  We've had it.  They're here now.  Oh Christ it's cold!  I want to go home."

            Young Mr. Povondra glanced at him quizzically and took hold of the oars.  "I'll take there you, Dad," he said in a worried voice and drove the boat to the island with a few strong strokes of the oars.  "Just leave it, I'll tie the boat up."

            "Whys it so cold?" the old man wondered as his teeth chattered.

            "I'll keep hold of you, Dad.  Just come with me," he urged as he took him by the arm.  "I think you must have caught a cold on the water.  It was just a piece of wood, that's all."  The old man was shaking like a leaf.

            "Piece of wood?  Don't give me that!  I know what I saw!  It was a newt!  Let go of me!"  Mr. Povondra junior did something he had never done in his life before; he hailed a taxi and pushed his father in as he told the driver where to go. 

            "I'll take you, Dad, it's getting late."

            "It's already too late," his father raved.  "It's much too late.  We've all had it, Frank.  That wasn't a piece of wood.  That was them!"  When they got home, young Mr. Povondra almost had to carry his father up the stairs. 

            "Get the bed ready, Mum," he whispered quickly at the door.  "We've got to put Dad to bed, he's been taken ill all of a sudden." 

            So there was Father Povondra lying under the bedclothes; his nose peeking strangely out from his face and his lips murmuring and mumbling something that could not be understood; how old he looked, how old!  Then he became a little calmer ...

            "Are you feeling better now, Dad?"  At the foot of the bed was Mother Povondra, her hand to her mouth and weeping into her apron; their daughter in law was tending the stove and the children, Frank and Marie, gazed wide-eyed at their grandfather as if they hardly knew him.  "Are you sure you don't want a doctor, Dad?"  Father Povondra looked at the children and whispered something; then his eyes suddenly filled with tears.  "Is there anything you need, Dad?"

            "Yes, yes there is something," the old man whispered.  "Something you ought to know.  It's all my fault.  If only I'd never let that sea captain in to see Mr. Bondy, if I'd never let him in, all this would never have happened ..."

            "It's alright, nothing's happened, Dad," young Povondra tried to soothe him.

            "You don't understand these things," the old man gasped.  "We've all had it, don't you see that?  It's the end of the world.  It's going to be all sea even here, even here now that the newts are here.  And it's all my fault; I should never have let that sea captain in to see Mr. Bondy.  Everyone ought to know, they ought to know whose fault it all is."

            "Nonsense," his son replied sharply.  "You shouldn't be thinking like this, Dad.  It's everyone's fault.  It's governments' fault, it's big business's fault.  Everyone wanted to have all the newts they could get.  We all wanted to get as much out of the newts as we could.  That's why we sent them all those weapons and all that - it's all our faults."

            Mr. Povondra looked up crossly.  "It always used to be nothing but sea, and that's how it's going to be again.  It's the end of the world.  Somebody told me once that even Prague was seabed once.  I think it must have been the newts that did it then as well.  I should never have let that sea captain in to see Mr. Bondy.  There was something that kept telling me, don't do it, and then I thought to myself, perhaps I'll get a tip from this sea captain.  And then, he never did.  That's how you destroy the whole world you see, all for nothing ..."  The old man gulped back something like a tear.  "I know, I know full well, we've all had it.  It's the end of the world, and it's all my fault ..."

            "Grandfather, wouldn't you like to have some tea?" asked the young Mrs. Povondra sympathetically.

            "All I want," the old man sighed, "all I want is for these children to forgive me."

 

11 - THE AUTHOR TALKS TO HIMSELF

 

            "Well you can't just leave it like that, can you!" the authors internal voice declared. 

            Well, why not? asked the author, rather unsure of himself.

            "You mean you're going to let Mr. Povondra die like that?"

            Well I don't want to do it like that but, well, Mr. Povondra's an old man after all, he must be well over seventy ...

            "And you're going to leave him to die in a state of mental torture like that?  Can't you even say something like But Grandad, it's not as bad as all that, the newts won't destroy the world, mankind will save itself, just you wait and see?  Surely there's something you can do for him!"

            I suppose I could get a doctor for him, the author suggested.  Suppose the old man has had an attack of nerves; or at that age he could have had a lung inflammation, which, thanks be to God, he survives; and he could still sit little Marie on his knee and ask what she's been learning in school.  All the joys of old age, I could let the old man have all the joys of old age.

            "Fine sort of joys of old age that is," the internal voice sneered.  "Hell hug the child with his ancient hands and all the time hell be thinking - thinking with horror - that one day shell be fleeing from the rush of water inexorably flooding the whole world; hell wrinkle his bushy brow and whisper in a voice of dread: That's what I did, Marie, that's what I did.  Listen, do you really want to have the whole of mankind destroyed?"

            The author frowned.  Don't ask me what I want.  Do you think I wanted to see the continents where people live reduced to rubble, do you think I wanted it to end like this?  That was just the logical course of events; what could I have done to stop that?  I did everything I could; I gave people enough warning; what about that X, that was partly me.  I warned them, don't give the newts weapons and explosives, stop this vile trading in salamanders, and so on - and you saw how it all turned out.  They all had a thousand good economic and political reasons why they couldn't stop.  I'm not a politician or a businessman; how am I supposed to persuade them about these things.  What are we supposed to do; quite likely the world will collapse and disappear under water; but at least that will happen for political and economic reasons we can all understand, at least it will happen with the help of science technology and public opinion, with human ingenuity of all sorts!  Not some cosmic catastrophe but just the same old reasons to do with the struggle for power and money and so on.  There's nothing we can do about that.

            The internal voice was quiet for a while.  "And don't you feel sorry for mankind?"

            Hold on,  not so fast!  Nobody's saying the whole of mankind has to be destroyed.  All the newts want is more shoreline where they can live and lay their eggs.  Maybe what they'll do is turn the continents into lots of long strings so that there's as much shoreline as possible.  What if there are still some people surviving on these strips of land?  And there they can work metal and other things for the salamanders.  As the newts can't work with fire themselves, can they.

            "So mankind will be put into the service of the newts."

            Yes, if that's what you want to call it.  They'll simply be working in factories like they do now.  They'll just have different masters, that's all.  So that means it might not be so different after all ...

            "And don't you feel sorry for mankind?"

            Oh, just leave me alone, for Gods sake!  What am I supposed to do about it?  It is what the people wanted, don't forget; they all wanted to have newts, they wanted commerce, industry and technology; civil authorities and military authorities, they all wanted it; even Povondra junior said so:  it's all of our faults.  How do you think I could not feel sorry for mankind, anyway?  And most of all, I felt sorry for them when I saw how, of their own free will and whatever the cost, how they were hurtling to their own perdition.  It'd be enough to make anyone scream.  He'd shout and raise his hands as if he'd seen a train going down the wrong track.  And now it can't be stopped.  The newts are going to keep on multiplying on and on and on and they'll go on demolishing the old continents on and on.  Think what it was that Wolf Meynert said about the newts:  that people would have to make way for them; and it would only be the salamanders that would create a world that was happy, unified and uniform ...

            "Oh come on, now!  Wolf Meynert?  Wolf Meynert was an intellectual.  You think up something as vile and murderous and nonsensical as this and you think Wolf Meynert is going to save the world?  Never mind, leave it.  What do you think Marie might be doing now?"

            Marie?  I suppose she's out playing somewhere.  Don't make a noise, they told her, Grandad's asleep.  But she doesn't know what's happening and it's a very long time before ...

            "And what's she actually doing?"

            Don't know.  Maybe she's trying to touch her nose with the tip of her tongue.

            "There, you see?  And you'd let something like a new Great Flood come along."

            Just stop it, will you.  I can't work miracles.  What has to happen will happen!  Things run along their inevitable course.  And even that's reassuring in its way: that everything that happens has its own necessity and follows certain rules.

            "Couldn't the newts be stopped in some way?"

            No.  There are too many of them.  They've got to have room to live in.

            "What about if they all died out in some way?  Something like some kind of epidemic or degeneration..."

            No, that's too cheap and easy.  Why should nature have to put right what's been done by man?  See? - not even you think they could do anything to save themselves now.  You basically think something will come along from somewhere else.  I'll tell you something: do you know who it is that still - even now when a fifth of Europe is already underwater - is still providing the newts with explosives and torpedoes and drills?  Do you know who it is that's working feverishly in all the laboratories, trying to find even more effective machines and materials for sweeping the world out of existence?  Do you know who it is who's lending the newts money, who it is who's financing the end of the world, this new Flood?

            "Yes, I know.  All the factories.  All the banks.  All the countries in the world."

            Well then!  If it was just newts against people it might be possible to do something; but when it's people against people then there's no way of stopping it, is there. 

            "Hold on, people against people!  I've just thought of something.  What if it was newts against newts?"

            Newts against newts.  How do you mean?

            "Well what if for instance ... if there are too many newts they might start squabbling about some tiny stretch of coast or some bay or something; then they can start fighting about bigger and bigger lengths of coast until they get into a big struggle about all the coastlines in the world, eh?  Newts against newts!  How's that, wouldn't that follow the natural course of events?"

            Er, no, that wouldn't work.  You can't have newts fighting with newts.  That wouldn't be natural.  The newts are just one species.

            "Well people are just one species too, aren't they.  And it's never stopped them fighting with each other; all the same species and think of all the excuses for war they've used!  It hasn't had to be about space to live in, it's been about power, prestige, influence, fame, resources and I don't know what else!  Why couldn't the newts start fighting among themselves about something like prestige?"

            Why would they do that?  What do you think they'd get out of it?

            "Nothing, except that some of them would get more coast to live on for a short time and a bit more power than the others.  And then after a while it'd be the other way round."

            And why would some have more power than the others?  They're all the same, after all, they're all newts; they've all got the same skeleton, they're all as ugly as each other and all as mediocre as each other.  What would make them start killing each other?  Just tell me what you think it is that they might start fighting over. 

            "Just leave them to it and they'll soon find something.  If there's one group living on the western shore and another on the eastern, they'll probably start to despise each other in the name of West against East.  And, here you've got the European salamanders while down there there are the African; it'd be strange if one lot didn't want to be better than the others!  So they can go and teach the others a lesson in the name of civilisation, or expansionism or I don't know what: they're bound to think of some kind of ideal or political reason which means that newts on one shore will have to go and beat up the newts on the other shore.  The salamanders are as civilised as we are, don't forget; they won't be short of arguments to do with power or commercial interests or legal rights or culture of some such."

            And they've got plenty of weapons.  Don't forget they're fantastically well armed.

            "Yep, they've got plenty of weapons.  And they could learn how it is that history's made from the example given by people, couldn't they!"

            Hold on a sec., hold on.  (The author jumps up and starts to pace excitedly around his study.)  You're right, it would be strange if they didn't do it!  I can see it now.  You only need to look at the map of the world - where's that map, I've got one here somewhere, where is it?

            "There it is."

            Right.  So here's the Atlantic, there's the Mediterranean, the North Sea.  Europe here, America there - so this here is the cradle of culture and modern civilisation.  And somewhere there is the sunken city of Atlantis ...

            "And now that's where the newts are flooding Atlantis all over again."

            That's it.  And here is ... the Pacific, the Indian Ocean.  The ancient and mysterious Orient.  The cradle of civilisation, as they say.  And somewhere here, somewhere to the east of Africa, is the mythical island of Lemuria that was flooded.  Sumatra, and a bit to the east of Sumatra ...

            "The little island of Tana Masa. The cradle of the newts."

            Exactly.  And that's where King Salamander, the spiritual leader of all the newts, has his court.  Captain van Toch's tapa-boys still live there, the original newts in the Pacific, and still half wild.  So this is their Orient.  The whole area is called Lemuria now, while the other area, the civilised, Europeanised or Americanised area where they use all the modern technology, that's Atlantis.  So Chief Salamander rules there as a dictator, the great conqueror, soldier and inventor, the Genghis Khan of the newts and destroyer of dry land.  Now he will be a magnificent figure.

            ("... but, do you think he's really a newt?")

            (... No.  Chief Salamander is human.  His real name is Andreas Schultze, and he took part in the Great War as an NCO somewhere)

            ("So that's it!")

            (Yes, that's it, now you've got it.)  So there's Atlantis here, Lemuria there.  They form two different groups because of geography, administration, cultural differences ..

            "... and national differences.  Don't forget about national differences.  The Lemurian salamanders speak Pidgin English, whereas the Atlantic ones speak Basic English."

            Yes, alright.  As time goes by, the Atlantic newts go through the old Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean ..

            "Naturally, the classic way to the East."

            Right.  And at the same time, the Lemurian newts press on around the Cape of Good Hope to the western coast of what had been Africa, asserting that the whole of Africa is part of Lemuria. 

            "Naturally."

            They use slogans such as, Lemuria for Lemurians, Out with the Foreigners, and so on.  A gulf of mistrust develops between Atlanta and Lemuria and old enmities are revived.  Their hatred becomes a matter of life and death.

            "Or else they develop into different nations."

            Yes.  The Atlantians despise the Lemurians and call them filthy savages;  the Lemurians have a fanatical hatred for the Atlantian newts and see them as imperialists, western devils, and corruptors of the ancient purity of newtdom.  Chief Salamander forces the Lemurians to grant concessions on their shores, supposedly in the interests of trade and civilisation.  King Salamander, the noble patriarch of the Lemurians, has to grant these concessions against his will because they have less weapons.  Things flare up in the mouth of the Tigris, not far from where Baghdad used to be: the native Lemurians attack the Atlantian colonists, killing two of their officers, supposedly because of some insult to their nation.  And as a result of that ...

            ".. it leads to war.  Naturally."

            Yes, there's a world war of newts against newts.

            "In the name of culture and decency."

            And in the name of True Newtdom.  In the name of Glory and Greatness.  Their slogan is, It's us or them!  The Lemurians, armed with Malay kukries and daggers cut down the Atlantian intruders without mercy; but the Atlantian newts have been educated by Europeans and are more advanced and release poisonous chemicals and specially cultured bacteria into the Lemurian Sea and these weapons are so effective they poison all the oceans of the world.  The sea is infected with artificially cultivated plague.  And that's it.  All the newts die.

            "All of them?"

            All of them.  Down to the very last one.  They'll become an extinct species.  All that'll be left of them will be the old fossil of Andrias Scheuchzeri in Öhningen.

            "And what about the people?"

            The people?  Oh, yes, the people.  Well, bit by bit they start to come back down from the hills back down to the coasts of what's left of the continents; but the ocean will still be full of the stench of decomposing newts.  The continents slowly grow back because of the silt deposited by rivers; the sea is pushed back bit by bit, and everything will be almost the same as it was before.  There's a new legend about a Great Flood sent by God to punish man for his sins.  And there will be new legends about lands that disappeared under the water, and these lands will have been the cradle of human civilisation; and there will myths and legends about places like England and France and Germany ...

            "And then?"

            ... and then, I don't really know.