the salute with a clash of accoutrements

With a start he realized that Gerson had come into the room and heard the clear-cut, even footsteps approach him. The organizer of victory came to the salute with a clash of accoutrements. “Everything is ready, sir,” he said imperatively. Mr. Parham seemed to assent, but now he knew that he obeyed.
Like the damned of Swedenborg’s visions, he had come of his own accord to his own servitude. The Lord Paramount obeyed in silence.
They were perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the crest. The sun was setting, a white blaze, which rimmed the line of the hill with iridescence. For an instant the Lord Paramount glanced back at the bleakness of the Cornish landscape, coldly golden, and then turned to the ascent. Five. Six we had. But one is lost. All the coast has been played hokey with. The sea bed’s coming up. God knows how they’ve done it, but they’ve raised scores of square miles. Heaved it up somehow. Our submarine must have hit a lump or barrier — which ought not to have been there. They’ve just made all this Lyonesse of theirs out of nothing — to save paying decent prices to decent landowners. They bore down through it and take out minerals — minerals we’d give our eyes to get — that were hidden under the bottom of the sea. The Lord Paramount felt again that sense of insufficiency that had been troubling him so frequently during the last few days. He had asked a silly question. More and more was Gerson with his lucid technical capacity taking control of things. There was nothing more to be said, and in silence the Lord Paramount surveyed the view that had opened out before them. Gerson was still in control. The land was changed indeed.
Cayme was unlike any town, any factory, any normal place that Mr. Parham had ever seen. For it was Mr. Parham’s eye that now regarded it. It sat up against the incandescent sky, broad, black, squat, like some monstrous new development of the battleship. It was a low, long battleship magnified by ten. Against the light it had no form nor detail, only a hard, long shape. Its vast shadow veiled a wedge of unassimilable detail, that might be a wilderness of streams and rich pools, in gloom and mystery. The land came out to this place, shining where it caught the light, or cut into blunt denticulations by long shadows, alternated triangles of darkness, wherever there was a rock or ridge to impede the light. There they’ve got the stuff. They’ve got it; they’ve got everything. If we can wrench that place out of their hands suddenly — we have it all. I have men who can work it all right, given the stuff. Then we shall have poison gas to scare the world stiff. . . . And we’ll scare them. . . . But swift and sure like the pounce of a cat — we must get them down before they can lift a finger. They’ll blow the place to smithereens before they let us have it. Camelford has said as much. God knows what chemists are coming to! They didn’t dare say ‘No’ to a soldier in the last Great War.