As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China. The tiny
airships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each,
and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved,
one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glass
tubes.
Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would have
looked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few of
them he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, their
carcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, and
piled high on the abandoned death-waggons. But for the rest he
would have had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire.
And not all would he have found fleeing from plague-stricken
Peking, for behind them, by hundreds of thousands of unburied
corpses by the wayside, he could have marked their flight. And as
it was with Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, and
villages of the Empire. The plague smote them all. Nor was it one
plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every virulent
form of infectious death stalked through the land. Too late the
Chinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossal
preparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights of
the tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass. The
proclamations of the government were vain. They could not stop the
eleven million plague-stricken wretches, fleeing from the one city
of Peking to spread disease through all the land. The physicians
and health officers died at their posts; and death, the all-
conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang Fwung.
It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the second
week, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died in
the fourth week.
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