BOOK THE FIRST.

The swift bullet howls through the tearing of the air;
The air, filled with thunders and lightning—that clamor,
What is it other than air and clouds bursting
By the strife of heat and cold, pressing against each other?
And this saltpeter-air original: "salpeterlucht"; the gases produced by igniting gunpowder, within the pregnant metal The "pregnant metal" refers to the hollow chamber of a cannon,
Crammed to the point of bursting; how it vomits lead and steel
Upon its enemies, in storming or in boarding!
How it demolishes castles, and shatters fleets into splinters, grit, and rags!
If the "red rooster" An old Dutch idiom for a spark or the intentional setting of a fire ignites a hellish mine,
How the belly of the earth bellows! How the air shrinks with pain,
Before she births a heap of ruins made of human flesh and ramparts!
How the earth thunders and quakes before she caves in,
When the swirling of the winds against one another
Toils within her bosom for a breath of air, and feels
No relief, until the pregnant one, in her deliverance,
Bears a chaos chaos (baiert): a confused, primordial mass or a void, and destroys city, mountain, rock, and woods,
And stream and field, and flings everything into a heap,
So that miles of people are set to flight!
Also, this great universe original: "begrijp"; the physical world as understood by man can suffer no void Referring to "horror vacui," the Aristotelian belief that nature abhors a vacuum and will move to fill any empty space immediately:
This is proven: for when the air is sucked out of a pipe,
The pipe then grips the tongue. No wine-jug sinks to the bottom,
If the wine-jug plunges into the water with its mouth downward.
Though one submerges the jug, it will hold back the water
With the element of air. The syringe shall spray water,
And swallow it as if from thirst, or a blue dropsy,
Through the driven-out air and the air drawn in.
The wine-siphon wine-siphon (wijnverlaeter): a tool used to transfer wine between vessels without disturbing the sediment can thus transfer the wines,
Contained from full tuns into an empty vessel,
And blow Rhenish wine, or the French grape-juice,
With its bellows from the full into the empty vat.
The wine-pump drinks the wine, be it choice or lesser,
And it does not flow out, if one covers the open air-vent original: "luchtoor"; literally "air-ear," the small hole at the top of a pipette or pump
Above with a finger, and seals and stops it tight
Against the air, after which no liquid flows away or drops down,