My neighbor shrugged his shoulders. "How do I know? It's a carefully guarded secret of the authorities. However, they say that the power of Mulflar is used to generate electricity in the machine—to generate it in such excessive quantities that the engine becomes supercharged and releases its energy through the tubes in tremendous lightning blades."
"I see," said I. "The machine becomes somewhat like a thunder-cloud, supercharged with positive electricity—"
"Thunder-cloud?" demanded my companion. "What's that?"
I perceived that I had used the wrong illustration, for, of course, thunder-clouds were not known underground.
"The only trouble," proceeded my neighbor, after I had vainly tried to convey an idea of the nature of a thunder-cloud—"the only trouble is in aiming the lightnings. Of course, we try to direct them accurately through the different tubes, but they don't always go where we want them to. You can never tell where the lightning will strike."
"I should call that a fatal difficulty," said I.
"Not at all! Wherever it hits, it's certain to kill—that is to say—" here he paused, greatly embarrassed—"that is to say, to turn over some of the enemy. And that, after all, is the only thing that counts!"
I was about to reply, remarking that I perhaps owed my life to the inexpertness of the foe in aiming the lightnings, when all at once the crowd broke into song, chanting the National Anthem in a tumultuous chorus as the last of the lightning-spitters rolled past.
Unfortunately, I have forgotten all the stanzas except the first two; but these, which I give in a translation that does scant justice to the magnificence of the original, will illustrate the theme and idea of the whole: