Grade 9: Unit 6

It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal, and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified!

He bade me look into the smoke of the fire and see—I saw and told what I saw.

His eyes were stern when I told him—he was no longer my father but a priest.

I went fasting, as is the law. My body hurt, but not my heart.

I do not know the customs of rivers—we are the People of the Hills.

With unbelievable tools they did giant works—no part of the earth was safe from them, for, if they wished for a thing, they summoned it from the other side of the world.

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs.

Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.

Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips.

Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth a fire now blazed up warmly.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white

These were the first of the macabre tributes we saw during our two days in the zone. Dolls sprawling half dressed in cribs, gas masks hanging from trees—tableaux placed by visitors, here legally or otherwise, signifying a lost, quiet horror.

There is something deeply rooted in the human soul that draws us to sites of unimaginable disaster. Pompeii, Antietam, Auschwitz, and Treblinka—all eerily quiet now.

Then there is the specter of nuclear meltdown. In 2011, Chernobyl, site of the world's worst catastrophe at a nuclear power plant, was officially declared a tourist attraction.

...maybe then
when we watched them turn from us
faithless at last
and walk in a long line away

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

For historical documentation, archival audio is considered to be a primary source.

Tone can vary from friendly, breezy, gentle, or playful to serious, intense, solemn, or even aggressive.

Radio show hosts often use understatement to establish a humorous or ironic tone.

Banter often includes workplay, jokes, and other witty remarks.

Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across the cover a few hours later. From these initial newspaper items on Oct. 31, 1938, the apocryphal apocalypse only grew in the retelling.

Both American Experience and Radiolab also omit the salient fact that several important CBS affiliates (including Boston's WEEI) pre-empted Welles' broadcast in favor of local commercial programming, further shrinking its audience