第 17 页

vast mass of buildings, there thrust the twisted end of a water-main,

two hundred feet in the air, thunderously spouting a shining cascade.

And everywhere great multitudes of people.

Wherever there was space and foothold, people swarmed, little people,

small and minutely clear, except where the sunset touched them to

indistinguishable gold. They clambered up the tottering walls, they

clung in wreaths and groups about the high-standing pillars. They

swarmed along the edges of the circle of ruins. The air was full of

their shouting, and were pressing and swaying towards the central space.

The upper storeys of the Council House seemed deserted, not a human

being was visible. Only the drooping banner of the surrender hung

heavily against the light. The dead were within the Council House, or

hidden by the swarming people, or carried away. Graham could see only

a few neglected bodies in gaps and corners of the ruins, and amidst the

flowing water.

"Will you let them see you, Sire?" said Ostrog. "They are very anxious

to see you."

Graham hesitated, and then walked forward to where the broken verge

of wall dropped sheer. He I stood looking down, a lonely, tall, black

figure against the sky.

Very slowly the swarming ruins became aware of him. And as they did so

little bands of black-uniformed men appeared remotely, thrusting through

the crowds towards the Council House. He saw little black heads become

pink, looking at him, saw by that means a wave of recognition sweep

across the space. It occurred to him that he should accord them some

recognition. He held up his arm, then pointed to the Council House and

dropped his hand. The voices below became unanimous, gathered volume,

came up to him as multitudinous wavelets of cheering.

The western sky was a pallid bluish green, and Jupiter shone high in

the south, before the capitulation was accomplished. Above was a slow

insensible change, the advance of night serene and beautiful; below was

hurry, excitement, conflicting orders, pauses, spasmodic developments of

organisation, a vast ascending clamour and confusion. Before the Council

came out, toiling perspiring men, directed by a conflict of shouts,

carried forth hundreds of those who had perished in the hand-to-hand

conflict within those long passages and chambers.

Guards in black lined the way that the Council would come, and as far

as the eye could reach into the hazy blue twilight of the ruins, and

swarming now at every possible point in the captured Council House

and along the shattered cliff of its circumadjacent buildings, were

innumerable people, and their voices even when they were not cheering,

were as the soughing of the sea upon a pebble beach. Ostrog had chosen

a huge commanding pile of crushed and overthrown masonry, and on this

a stage of timbers and metal girders was being hastily constructed.

Its essential parts were complete, but humming and clangorous machinery

still glared fitfully in the shadows beneath this temporary edifice.

The stage had a small higher portion on which Graham stood with Ostrog

and Lincoln close beside him, a little in advance of a group of minor

officers. A broader lower stage surrounded this quarter deck, and on

this were the black-uniformed guards of the revolt armed with the little

green weapons whose very names Graham still did not know. Those standing

about him perceived that his eyes wandered perpetually from the swarming

people in the twilight ruins about him to the darkling mass of the White

Council House, whence the Trustees would presently come, and to the

gaunt cliffs of ruin that encircled him, and so back to the people. The

voices of the crowd swelled to a deafening tumult.

He saw the Councillors first afar off in the glare of one of the

temporary lights that marked their path, a little group of white figures

blinking in a black archway. In the Council House they had been in

darkness. He watched them approaching, drawing nearer past first this

blazing electric star and then that; the minatory roar of the crowd over

whom their power had lasted for a hundred and fifty years marched along

beside them. As they drew still nearer their faces came out weary, white

and anxious. He saw them blinking up through the glare about him and

Ostrog. He contrasted their strange cold looks in the Hall of Atlas....

Presently he could recognise several of them; the man who had rapped

the table at Howard, a burly man with a red beard, and one

delicate-featured, short, dark man with a peculiarly long skull. He

noted that two were whispering together and looking behind him at

Ostrog. Next there came a tall, dark and handsome man, walking downcast.

Abruptly he glanced up, his eyes touched Graham for a moment, and

passed beyond him to Ostrog. The way that had been made for them was so

contrived that they had to march past and curve about before they came

to the sloping path of planks that ascended to the stage where their

surrender was to be made.

"The Master, the Master! God and the Master," shouted the people. "To

hell with the Council!" Graham looked at their multitudes, receding

beyond counting into a shouting haze, and then at Ostrog beside him,

white and steadfast and still. His eye went again to the little group

of White Councillors. And then he looked up at the familiar quiet stars

overhead. The marvellous element in his fate was suddenly vivid. Could

that be his indeed, that little life in his memory two hundred years

gone by--and this as well?

CHAPTER XIV. FROM THE CROW'S NEST

And so after strange delays and through an avenue of doubt and battle,

this man from the nineteenth century came at last to his position at the

head of that complex world.

At first when he rose from the long deep sleep that followed his rescue

and the surrender of the Council, he did not recognise his surroundings.

By an effort he gained a clue in his mind, and all that had happened

came back to him, at first with a quality of insincerity like a story

heard, like something read out of a book. And even before his memories

were clear, the exultation of his escape, the wonder of his prominence

were back in his mind. He was owner of half the world; Master of the

Earth. This new great age was in the completest sense his. He no longer

hoped to discover his experiences a dream; he became anxious now to

convince himself that they were real.

An obsequious valet assisted him to dress under the direction of a

dignified chief attendant, a little man whose face proclaimed him

Japanese, albeit he spoke English like an Englishman. From the latter he

learnt something of the state of affairs. Already the revolution was an

accepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout the city.

Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the most part

with delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the thousand cities

of Western America, after two hundred years still jealous of New York,

London, and the East, had risen almost unanimously two days before at

the news of Graham's imprisonment. Paris was fighting within itself. The

rest of the world hung in suspense.

While he was breaking his fast, the sound of a telephone bell jetted

from a corner, and his chief attendant called his attention to the voice

of Ostrog making polite enquiries. Graham interrupted his refreshment

to reply. Very shortly Lincoln arrived, and Graham at once expressed

a strong desire to talk to people and to be shown more of the new life

that was opening before him. Lincoln informed him that in three hours'

time a representative gathering of officials and their wives would be

held in the state apartments of the wind-vane Chief. Graham's desire

to traverse the ways of the city was, however, at present impossible,

because of the enormous excitement of the people. It was, however, quite

possible for him to take a bird's eye view of the city from the crow's

nest of the windvane keeper. To this accordingly Graham was conducted

by his attendant. Lincoln, with a graceful compliment to the attendant,

apologised for not accompanying them, on account of the present pressure

of administrative work.

Higher even than the most gigantic wind-wheels hung this crow's nest,

a clear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck on a

spear of metallic filigree, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was drawn

in a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway down the frail-seeming stem was

a light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes--minute they looked

from above--rotating slowly on the ring of its outer rail. These were

the specula, _en rapport_ with the wind-vane keeper's mirrors, in one

of which Ostrog had shown him the coming of his rule. His Japanese

attendant ascended before him and they spent nearly an hour asking and

answering questions.

It was a day full of the promise and quality of spring. The touch of the

wind warmed. The sky was an intense blue and the vast expanse of London

shone dazzling under the morning sun. The air was clear of smoke and

haze, sweet as the air of a mountain glen.

Save for the irregular oval of ruins about the House of the Council and

the black flag of the surrender that fluttered there, the mighty city

seen from above showed few signs of the swift revolution that had, to

his imagination, in one night and one day, changed the destinies of the

world. A multitude of people still swarmed over these ruins, and the

huge openwork stagings in the distance from which started in times of

peace the service of aeroplanes to the various great cities of Europe

and America, were also black with the victors. Across a narrow way of

planking raised on trestles that crossed the ruins a crowd of workmen

were busy restoring the connection between the cables and wires of the

Council House and the rest of the city, preparatory to the transfer

thither of Ostrog's headquarters from the Wind-Vane buildings.

For the rest the luminous expanse was undisturbed. So vast was its

serenity in comparison with the areas of disturbance, that presently

Graham, looking beyond them, could almost forget the thousands of men

lying out of sight in the artificial glare within the quasi-subterranean

labyrinth, dead or dying of the overnight wounds, forget the improvised

wards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and bearers feverishly busy,

forget, indeed,' all the wonder, consternation and novelty under the

electric lights. Down there in the hidden ways of the anthill he knew

that the revolution triumphed, that black everywhere carried the day,

black favours, black banners, black festoons across the streets. And out

here, under the fresh sunlight, beyond the crater of the fight, as if

nothing had happened to the earth, the forest of Wind Vanes that had

grown from one or two while the Council had ruled, roared peacefully

upon their incessant duty.

Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the Surrey

Hills rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours

of Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over the

countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges

had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled

among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like

vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast

their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed

away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. And underneath

these wandered the countless flocks and herds of the British Food Trust

with their lonely guards and keepers.

Not a familiar outline anywhere broke the cluster of gigantic shapes

below. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings in

Westminster, embedded out of sight, arched over and covered in among the

giant growths of this great age. The Themes, too, made no fall and gleam

of silver to break the wilderness of the city; the thirsty water mains

drank up every drop of its waters before they reached the walls. Its bed

and estuary scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea water and a race

of grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of trade from the Pool

thereby beneath the very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in the

eastward between earth and sky hung the clustering masts of the colossal

shipping in the Pool. For all the heavy traffic, for which there was

no need of haste, came in gigantic sailing ships from the ends of the

earth, and the heavy goods for which there was urgency in mechanical

ships of a smaller swifter sort.

And to the south over the hills, came vast aqueducts with sea water

for the sewers and in three separate directions, ran pallid lines--the

roads, stippled with moving grey specks. On the first occasion that

offered he was determined to go out and see these roads. That would come

after the flying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officer

described them as a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yards

wide, each one for the traffic going in one direction, and made of a

substance called Eadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he could

gather, resembling toughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic of

narrow rubber-shod vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeled

vehicles, sweeping along at velocities of from one to six miles

a minute. Railroads had vanished; a few embankments remained as

rust-crowned trenches here and there. Some few formed the cores of

Eadhamite ways.

Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleets

of advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistas

northward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. No

aeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only one

little-seeming aeropile circled high in the blue distance above the

Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.

A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to

imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all

the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood,

some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single