“Yes, for an instant. They listened and I repeated, ‘Stop!’ They laughed and said it was an echo. I don’t know what sort of a thing an echo is. Once on a time when we heard a voice in the wood we all knew it was a Haji speaking. Now they say: ‘It is an echo,’ and laugh.”
“And they cut you down?”
“Yes, indeed, they cut me down. They worked a whole day. They took me first into the valley; next I felt myself carried quickly by a monster that spit fire.”
“The train.”
“Call it that, if you like. I was taken into a great house where there was another monster that cut the trees in sheets.”
“A sawmill.”
“Call it that if you like. I was cut into eight hundred parts, and each part was caught by iron jaws, swallowed and spit out, turned into thousands and thousands of little sticks, all exactly alike. A real army of sticks, whole regiments, were put at one time into a suffocating bath, from which they came out with phosphorus heads.
“At last they were shut up in little boxes, and then they were piled in pyramids in an immense room.”