In fact, his mission was to recruit people who would fight against the Tripods. There were always a few whose minds broke under the strain of Capping, and these became Vagrants, men who could not think properly and who wandered aimlessly from place to place. In that, boys and girls in their fourteenth year were taken up into one of the Tripods and returned later wearing Caps - a metal mesh that fitted close to the skull and made the wearer utterly obedient to our alien rulers. This happened during the summer which was to have been my last before I was presented for the Capping ceremony. I have told already how I left my native village, at the urging of a strange man who called himself Ozymandias. Our wise men, Beanpole had told me, had learned the means of doing this again, but needed resources that were not available to them here - nor would be, perhaps, while men were forced to skulk like rats in the dark corners of a world governed by the Tripods, those huge metal monsters who strode on three giant legs across the face of the earth. There were also long ropelike cables, which had once carried the power called electricity to light bulbs of glass along the way. Men had been here in the past, smoothing uneven floors, widening narrow gaps, sinking handrails into an artificial stone to aid and guide the traveler. The earth's convulsions, and the action of long-dead rivers, had hollowed out these caverns and channels in the limestone hills, but there were marks of the ancients, too. The work of nature here mingled with the work of man.
I was relieved from guard to go to the conference, and so went through the dimly lit tunnels late and alone.
And places where the water lay calm in long black reaches, its sound muted to a monotonous had continued for centuries and would continue for as many more. But there were places also where its rushing was clear and loud, and the actual torrent was visible by the light of oil lamps, flinging itself down dark rocky water-courses or spilling in a fall over a sheer edge of stone. In places it was no more than a faint whisper, heard only because of the great stillness all around in others, an eerie distant rumbling, like the voice of a giant talking to himself in the bowels of the earth.
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