So the efforts of the World Congress were almost entirely limited to searching each ship, plane, and individual leaving the doomed continent to be sure none of the fatal seeds were transported. Even this precaution was resented as an infringement on national sovereignty, but the resentment was limited to bellicose pronouncements in the newspapers; the republics looked on sullenly while their honor was systematically violated by phlegmatic inspectors.
75. The Grass grew to unheardof heights in the tropical valley of the Amazon. It washed the slopes of the Andes as it had the Cordilleras and the Rockies, leaving only the highest peaks free of its presence. It raced across the llanos, the savannas and the pampas and covered the high plateaus in a slow relentless growth.
The people ran from the Grass, not in a straight line from north to south, but by indirection, seeking first the seacoasts and then escape from the afflicted land. Those North Americans who had eluded the Grass once did not satisfy themselves with halfmeasures when their sanctuary was lost, but bought passage on any bottom capable, however dubiously, of keeping out the sea and embarked for the farthest regions.
76. In point of time, I am now about halfway through my narrative. It is hard to believe that only eleven years have passed since the Grass conquered South America; indeed, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to reconstruct these middle years at all. Not because they were hard or unpleasant—on the contrary, they carried me from one success to another—but because they have, in memory, the dreamlike quality of unreality, elusive, vague and tantalizing.
Like a dream, too, was the actual progress of the Grass. We were all, I think, impressed by the sense of repetition, of a scene enacted over and over again. It was this quality which gives my story, now that I look back upon it, a certain distortion, for no one, hearing it for the first time, and not as any reader of these words must be, thoroughly familiar with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the Grass. These efforts existed; we did not yield without struggles; we fought for South America as we had fought for North America. But it was a nightmare fight; our endeavors seem retrospectively those of the paralyzed....
The Grass gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into submission and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx from sparsely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror, disruption and confusion; pestilence, hysteria and famine.
The drama was not played through in one act, but many; to a world waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended; the green curtain came down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. The Grass looked wistfully across at Tierra del Fuego, the land of ice and fire, but even its voracity balked, momentarily at any rate, at the inhospitable island and left it to whatever refugees chose its shores as a slower but still certain death.
South America finally gone, the rest of the globe breathed easier. It would be a slander on humanity to say there was actual rejoicing when the World Congress sealed off this continent too, but whatever sorrow was felt for its loss was balanced by the feeling that at long last the peril of the Grass was finally ended. No longer would speculative Germans, thoughtful Chinese or wakeful Englishmen wonder if the supercyclone fans were indeed an effective barrier; no longer would Cubans, Colombians or Venezuelans look northward apprehensively. Oceanic barriers now confined the peril and though the world was shrunken and hurt it was yet alive. More, it was free from fear for the first time since the mutated seeds had blown over the saltband.
I must not give the impression that a wiping off of the Grass from the accountbooks of humanity was universal and complete. The World Congress periodically considered proposals for countermeasures. On the top of Mount Whitney Miss Francis still labored. New assistants were flown to her as the old ones wandered down the great rockslide from the old stone weatherhouse off into the Grass during fits of despondency, went mad from the realization that, except for problematical survivors on the polar caps, they were alone in an abandoned hemisphere, or died of simple homesickness. In the researchlaboratories of Consolidated Pemmican formulas for utilizing the Grass were still tinkered with, and the death of almost every publicspirited man of fortune revealed a will containing bequests to aid those seeking means of controlling the weed.
77. It is not, afterall, a detached history of the past twentyone years I am writing. Contemporaries are only too well aware of the facts and posterity will find them dehydrated in textbooks. I started out to tell of my own personal part in the coming of the Grass, not to take an Olympian and aloof view of the passion of man.