A lamp sparkled up: white-green.
London began to speak.
Freder looked up at the clock opposite the door, commanding the whole wall like a gigantic wheel. It was the same clock, which, from the heights of the New Tower of Babel, flooded by searchlights, flicked off its second-sparks over the great Metropolis.
Joh Fredersen’s head stood out against it. It was a crushing yet accepted halo above the brain of Metropolis.
The searchlights raved in a delirium of colour upon the narrow windows which ran from floor to ceiling. Cascades of light frothed against the panes. Outside, deep down, at the foot of the New Tower of Babel boiled the Metropolis. But in this room not a sound was to be heard but the incessantly dripping numbers.
The Rotwang-process had rendered the walls and windows sound-proof.
In this room, which was at the same time crowned and subjugated by the mighty time-piece, the clock, indicating numbers, nothing had any significance but numbers. The son of the great Master of Metropolis realised that, as long as numbers came dripping out of the invisible no word, which was not a number, and coming from a visible mouth, could lay claim to the least attention.
Therefore he stood, gazing unceasingly at his father’s head, watching the monstrous hand of the clock sweep onward, inevitably, like a sickle, a reaping scythe, pass through the skull of his father, without harming him, climb upwards, up the number-beset ring, creep around the heights and sink again, to repeat the vain blow of the scythe.
At last the white-red light went out. A voice ceased.
Then the white-green light went out, too.