 CHAPTER XII OSTROG Graham could now take a clearer view of his position. For a long time yet he wandered, but after the talk of the old man his discovery of this OSTROG was clear in his mind as the final inevitable decision. One thing was evident—those who were at the headquarters of the revolt had succeeded very admirably in suppressing the fact of his disappearance, but every moment he expected to hear the report of his death or of his recapture by the council. Presently a man stopped before him. Have you heard? he said. No, said Graham, starting. Near a dozen, said the man, a dozen men, and hurried on. A number of men and a girl passed in the darkness gesticulating and shouting, capitulated, given up, a dozen of men, two dozen of men, OSTROG, hurrah, OSTROG, hurrah! These cries receded became indistinct. Other shouting men followed. For a time his attention was absorbed in the fragments of speech he heard. He had a doubt whether all were speaking English. Scraps floated to him, scraps like pigeon English, like nigger dialect, blurred and mangled distortions. He dared a cost no one with questions. The impressions the people gave him jarred altogether with his preconceptions of the struggle and confirmed the old man's faith in OSTROG. It was only slowly he could bring himself to believe that all these people were rejoicing at the defeat of the council, that the council which had pursued him with such power and vigor was after all the weaker of the two sides in conflict. And if that was so, how did it affect him? Several times he hesitated on the verge of fundamental questions. Once he turned and walked for a long way after a little man of rotund inviting outline, but he was unable to master confidence to address him. It was only slowly that it came to him that he might ask for the wind vane offices, whatever the wind vane offices might be. His first inquiry simply resulted in a direction to go on towards Westminster. His second led to the discovery of a shortcut in which he was speedily lost. He was told to leave the ways to which he had hitherto confined himself, knowing no other means of transit, and to plunge down one of the middle staircases into the blackness of a crossway. Thereupon came some trivial adventures, chief of these an ambiguous encounter with a gruff, voiced, invisible creature speaking in a strange dialect that seemed at first a strange tongue, a thick flow of speech with the drifting corpses of English words therein, the dialect of the latter-day vile. Then another voice drew near, a girl's voice singing tra-la-la, tra-la-la. She spoke to Graham, her English touch was something of the same quality. She professed to have lost her sister she blundered needlessly into him, he thought, caught hold of him and laughed. But a word of vague remonstrance sent her into the unseen again. The sounds about him increased, stumbling people passed him, speaking excitedly. They have surrendered, the council, surely not the council, they're saying so in the ways. The passage seemed wider, suddenly the wall fell away. He was in a great space and people were stirring remotely. He inquired his way of an indistinct figure. Strikes straight across, said a woman's voice. He left his guiding wall and in a moment had stumbled against a little table on which were utensils of glass. Graham's eyes now attuned to darkness, made out a long vista with tables on either side. He went down this. At one or two of the tables he heard a clang of glass and a sound of eating. There were people then cool enough to dine, or daring enough to steal a meal in spite of social convulsion and darkness. Far off and high up he presently saw a pallid light of a semi-circular shape. As he approached this a black edge came up and hit it. He stumbled at steps and found himself in a gallery. He heard a sobbing, and found two scared little girls crouched by a railing. These children became silent at the near sound of feet. He tried to console them, but they were very still until he left them. Then as he receded he could hear them sobbing again. Immediately he found himself at the foot of a staircase and near a wide opening. He saw a dim twilight above this and ascended out of the blackness into a street of moving ways again. Along this a disorderly swarm of people marched shouting. They were singing snatches of the Song of the Revolt, most of them out of tune. Here and there torches flared creating brief hysterical shadows. He asked his way and was twice puzzled by that same thick dialect. His third attempt won an answer he could understand. It was two miles from the wind vane offices in Westminster, but the way was easy to follow. When at last he did approach the district of the wind vane offices it seemed to him from the cheering processions that came marching along the ways, from the tumult of rejoicing and finally from the restoration of the lighting of the city, that the overthrow of the council must already be accomplished, and still no news of his absence came to his ears. The re-illumination of the city came with startling abruptness. Suddenly he stood blinking, all about him men halted, dazzled, and the world was incandescent. The light found him already upon the outskirts of the excited crowds that choked the ways near the wind vane offices, and the sense of visibility and exposure that came with it turned his colorless intention of joining Ostrog to a keen anxiety. For a time he was jostled obstructed and endangered by men horse and weary with cheering his name, some of them bandaged and bloody in his cause. The frontage of the wind vane offices was illuminated by some moving picture, but what it was he could not see because in spite of his strenuous attempts the density of the crowd prevented him approaching it. From the fragments of speech he caught he judged it conveyed news of the fighting about the council-house. Ignorance and indecision made him slow and ineffective in his movements. For a time he could not conceive how he was to get within the unbroken façade of this place. He made his way slowly into the midst of this mass of people until he realized that the descending staircase of the central way led to the interior of the buildings. This gave him a goal, but the crowding in the central path was so dense that it was long before he could reach it. And even then he encountered intricate obstruction and had an hour of vivid argument first in this guard room and then in that before he could get a note taken to the one man of all men who was most eager to see him. His story was laughed to scorn at one place, and wiser for that when at last he reached a second stairway he professed simply to have news of extraordinary importance for Ostrog. What it was he would not say. They sent his note reluctantly. For a long time he waited in a little room at the foot of the lift-shaft, and thither at last came Lincoln, eager, apologetic, astonished. He stopped in the doorway scrutinizing Graham, then rushed forward effusively. Yes, he cried, it is you, and you are not dead. Graham made a brief explanation. My brother is waiting, explained Lincoln. He is alone in the wind-vane offices. We feared you had been killed in the theatre. He doubted, and things are very urgent still in spite of what we are telling them there, or he would have come to you. They ascended a lift, passed along a narrow passage, crossed a great hall, empty safe for two hurrying messengers, and entered a comparatively little room whose only furniture was a long city and a large oval disc of cloudy shifting gray hung by cables from the wall. There Lincoln left Graham for a space, and he remained alone without understanding the smoky shapes that drove slowly across this disc. His attention was arrested by a sound that began abruptly. It was cheering, the frantic cheering of a vast but very remote crowd, a roaring exultation. This ended as sharply as it had begun, like a sound heard between the opening and shutting of a door. In the outer room was a noise of hurrying steps and a melodious clinking as if a loose chain was running over the teeth of a wheel. Then he heard the voice of a woman, the rustle of unseen garments. It is Ostrach, he heard her say. A little bell rang fitfully, and then everything was still again. Presently came voices, footsteps and movement without. The footsteps of some one person detached itself from the other sounds and drew near, firm, evenly measured steps. The curtain lifted slowly. A tall, white-haired man, clad in garments of cream-colored silk, appeared, regarding Graham from under his raised arm. For a moment the white form remained holding the curtain, then dropped it and stood before it. Graham's first impression was of a very broad forehead, very pale blue eyes deep sunken under white brows, an aquiline nose, and a heavily lined, resolute mouth. The folds of flesh over the eyes, the drooping of the corners of the mouth, contradicted the upright bearing, and said the man was old. Graham rose to his feet instinctively, and for a moment the two men stood in silence, regarding each other. You are Ostrach, said Graham. I am Ostrach. The boss? So I am called. Graham felt the inconvenience of the silence. I have to thank you chiefly, I understand, for my safety, he said presently. We were afraid you were killed, said Ostrach, or sent to sleep again, forever. We have been doing everything to keep our secret, the secret of your disappearance. Where have you been? How did you get here? Graham told him briefly. Ostrach listened in silence. He smiled faintly. Do you know what I was doing when they came to tell me you would come? How can I guess? Preparing your double. My double? A man as like you as we could find. We were going to hypnotize him, to save him the difficulty of acting. It was imperative. The whole of this revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with us. Even now a great multitude of people has gathered in the theater clamoring to see you, they do not trust. You know, of course, something of your position. Very little, said Graham. It is like this, Ostrach walked a pace or two into the room and turned. You are absolute owner, he said, of the world. You are king of the earth. Your powers are limited in many intricate ways, but you are the figurehead, the popular symbol of government. This white council, the council of trustees, as it is called. I have heard the vague outlines of these things. I wondered. I came upon it, garrulous old man. I see. Our masses, the word comes from your days. You know, of course, that we still have masses. Regard you as our actual ruler, just as a great number of people in your days regarded the crown as the ruler. They are discontented. The masses all over the earth, with the rule of your trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent, the old quarrel of the common man with this commonness, the misery of work and discipline and unfitness. But your trustees have ruled ill. In certain matters in the administration of the labor companies, for example, they have been unwise. They have given endless opportunities. Already we of the popular party were agitating for reforms. When your waking came, came. If it had been contrived it could not have come more opportunely. He smiled. The public mind making no allowance for your years of quiescence had already hit on the thought of waking you and appealing to you and… flash! He indicated the outbreak by gesture and Graham moved his head to show that he had understood. The council muddled, quarreled. They always do. They could not decide what to do with you. You know how they imprisoned you? I see. And now we win? We win. Indeed we win. Tonight in five swift hours suddenly we struck everywhere. The wind vane people, the labor company and its millions burst the bonds. We got the pull of the airplanes. Yes, said Graham. That was of course essential, or they could have got away. All the city rose. Every third man almost was in it. All the blue, all the public services, save only just a few aeronauts and about half the red police. You were rescued, and their own police of the ways, not half of them could be massed at the council house, have been broken up, disarmed or killed. All London is ours now. Only the council house remains. Half of those who remained to them of the red police were lost in that foolish attempt to recapture you. They lost their heads when they lost you. They flung all they had at the theatre. We cut them off from the council house there. Truly tonight has been a night of victory. Everywhere your star has blazed. A day ago the White Council ruled as it has ruled for a gross of years, for a century and a half of years, and then with only a little whispering, a covert arming here and there, suddenly so. I am very ignorant, said Graham. I suppose I do not clearly understand the conditions of this fighting. If you could explain, where is the council? Where is the fight? Ostrog stepped across the room, something clicked, and suddenly, save for an oval glow, they were in darkness. For a moment Graham was puzzled. Then he saw that the cloudy grey disc had taken depth in colour, had assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange, unfamiliar scene. At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be. It was the daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear, across the picture, and halfway as it seemed between him and the remote review, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he perceived that the rows of great windwheels he saw, the wide intervals, the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he had fled from the council house. He distinguished an orderly file of red figures marching across an open space between files of men in black, and realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper surface of Latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the picture was passing slowly panorama fashion across the oval. In a moment you will see the fighting, said Ostrog at his elbow. Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space of London. All the houses are practically continuous now. The streets and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have disappeared. Something out of focus obliterated half the picture. This form suggested a man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that swept across the oval as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye, and the picture was clear again. And now Graham beheld men running down among the windwheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out little smoky flashes. They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right, gesticulating. It might be they were shouting, but of that the picture told nothing. They in the windwheels passed slowly and steadily across the field of the mirror. Now, said Ostrog, comes the council-house, and slowly a black edge crept into view and gathered Graham's attention. Soon it was no longer an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated peers and girders rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness, and over these vestiges of some splendid place countless minute men were clambering, leaping, swarming. This is the council-house, said Ostrog. Their last stronghold, and the fools wasted enough ammunition to hold out for a month in blowing up the buildings all about them to stop our attack. You heard the smash. It shattered half the brittle glass in the city. And while he spoke, Graham saw that beyond this area of ruins, overhanging it and rising to a great height, was a ragged mass of white building. This mass had been isolated by the ruthless destruction of its surroundings. Black gaps marked the passages the disaster had torn apart. Big holes had been slashed open and the decoration of their interiors showed dismally in the wintry dawn, and down the jagged walls hung festoons of divided cables and twisted ends of lines and metallic rods. And amidst all the vast details moved little red specks, the red clothes defenders of the council. Every now and then faint flashes illuminated the bleak shadows. At the first sight it seemed to Graham that an attack upon this isolated white building was in progress, but then he perceived that the party of the revolt was not advancing, but sheltered amidst the colossal wreckage that encircled this last ragged stronghold of the red-garbed men was keeping up a fitful firing. And not ten hours ago he had stood beneath the ventilating fans in a little chamber within that remote building, wondering what was happening in the world. Looking more attentively as this warlike episode moved silently across the center of the mirror, Graham saw that the white building was surrounded on every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe in concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to isolate themselves from a storm. He spoke of the loss of men that huge downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone. He indicated an improvised mortuary among the wreckage, showed ambulances swarming like cheese mites along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of moving ways. He was more interested in pointing out the parts of the council-house, the distribution of the besiegers. In a little while the civil contest that had convulsed London was no longer a mystery to Graham. It was no tumultuous revolt that occurred that night, no equal warfare, but a splendidly organized coup d'etat. Ostrog's grasp of details was astonishing. He seemed to know the business of even the smallest knot of black and red specks that crawled amidst these places. He stretched a huge black arm across the luminous picture, and showed the room whence Graham had escaped, and across the chasm of ruins the course of his flight. Graham recognized the gulf across which the gutter ran, and the wind-wheels where he had crouched from the flying machine. The rest of his path had succumbed to the explosion. He looked again at the council-house, and it was already half hidden, and on the right a hillside with a cluster of domes and pinnacles, hazy, dim, and distant, was gliding into view. "'And the council is really overthrown?' he said. "'Overtrown,' said Ostrog. "'And I—' "'Is it indeed true that I—' "'You are master of the world.' "'But that white flag—' "'That is the flag of the council—' "'the flag of the rule of the world—' "'It will fall. The fight is over.' Their attack on the theatre was their last frantic struggle. They have only a thousand men or so, and some of these men will be disloyal. They have little ammunition, and we are reviving the ancient arts. We are casting guns.' "'But—' "'Help! Is this city the world?' "'Practically this is all they have left to them of their empire. "'Abroad the cities have either revolted with us or wait the issue. "'Your awakening has perplexed them, paralyzed them.' "'But haven't the council flying machines? "'Why is there no fighting with them?' "'They had, but the greater part of the aeronauts were in the revolt with us. They wouldn't take the risk of fighting on our side, but they would not stir against us. We had to get a pull with the aeronauts. Quite half were with us, and the others knew it. Directly they knew you had got away—those looking for you dropped. We killed the men who shot at you an hour ago.' And we occupied the flying stages at the outset in every city we could, and so stopped and captured the greater aeroplanes. And as for those whole flying machines that turned out, for some did, we kept up too straight and steady a fire for them to get near the council-house. If they dropped they couldn't rise again because there's no clear space about there for them to get up. Several we have smashed. Several others have dropped and surrendered. The rest have gone off to the continent to find a friendly city if they can before the fuel runs out. Most of these men were only too glad to be taken prisoner and kept out of harm's way. Upsetting in a flying machine isn't a very attractive prospect. There's no chance for the council that way. Its days are done. He laughed and turned to the oval reflection again to show Graham what he meant by flying stages. Even the four nearer ones were remote and obscured by a thin morning haze. But Graham could perceive they were very vast structures, judged even by the standards of the things about them. And then as these dim shapes passed to the left there came again the sight of the expanse across which the disarmed men in red had been marching. And then the black ruins and then again the beleaguered white fastness of the council. It appeared no longer a ghostly pile but glowing amber in the sunlight for a cloud shadow had passed. About it a pygmy struggle still hung in suspense, but now the red defenders were no longer firing. So in a dusky stillness the man from the nineteenth century saw the closing scene of the great revolt, the forcible establishment of his rule. With a quality of startling discovery it came to him that this was his world and not that other he had left behind. That this was no spectacle to culminate and cease. That in this world lay whatever life was still before him lay all his duties and dangers and responsibilities. He turned with fresh questions, Astrag began to answer them, and then broke off abruptly. But these things I must explain more fully later. At present there are duties. The people are coming by the moving ways towards this ward from every part of the city. The markets and theatres are densely crowded. You are just in time for them. They are clamouring to see you. And abroad they want to see you. Paris, New York, Chicago, Denver, Capri. Thousands of cities are up and in a tumult, undecided and clamouring to see you. They have clamoured that you should be awakened for years, and now it is done they will scarcely believe. But surely, I can't go. Astrag answered from the other side of the room and the picture on the oval disk paled and vanished as the light jerked back again. There are Kinetto telephotographs, he said. As you bow to the people here, all over the world, myriads of myriads of people packed and still in darkened halls will see you also. In black and white, of course, not like this. And you will hear their shouts reinforcing the shouting in the hall. And there is an optical contrivance we shall use, said Astrag, used by some of the postures and women dancers. It may be novel to you. You stand in a very bright light, and they see not you but a magnified image of you thrown on a screen, so that even the furthest man in the remotest gallery can, if he chooses, mount your eyelashes. Graham clutched desperately at one of the questions in his mind. What is the population of London, he asked. Eight and twenty myriads. Eight and what? More than twenty-three millions. These figures went beyond Graham's imagination. You will be expected to say something, said Astrag. Not what you used to call a speech, but what our people call a word. Just one sentence, six or seven words, something formal. If I might suggest, I have awakened and my heart is with you. That is the sort of thing they want. What was that? asked Graham. I am awakened and my heart is with you. And bow, bow royally. But first we must get you black robes, for black is your color. Do you mind, and then they will disperse to their homes? Graham hesitated. I am in your hands, he said. Astrag was clearly of that opinion. He thought for a moment, turned to the curtain and called brief directions to some unseen attendance. Almost immediately a black robe, the very fellow of the black robe Graham had worn in the theatre, was brought. And as he threw it about his shoulders there came from the room without the shrilling of a high-pitched bell. Astrag turned in interrogation to the attendant, then suddenly seemed to change his mind, pulled the curtain aside, and disappeared. For a moment Graham stood with the deferential attendants listening to Astrag's retreating steps. There was a sound of quick question and answer and of men running. The curtain was snatched back and Astrag reappeared, his massive face glowing with excitement. He crossed the room in a stride, clicked the room into darkness, gripped Graham's arm, and pointed to the mirror. Even as we turned away, he said. Graham saw his index finger black and colossal above the mirrored council-house. For a moment he did not understand, and then he perceived that the flag-staff that had carried the white banner was bare. Do you mean, he began, the council has surrendered. Its rule is at an end for everyone. Look! an Astrag pointed to a coil of black that crept in little jerks up the vacant flag-staff, holding as it rose. The oval picture paled as Lincoln pulled the curtain aside and entered. They are clamorous, he said. Astrag kept his grip of Graham's arm. We have raised the people, he said. We have given them arms, for to-day at least, their wishes must be law. Lincoln held the curtain open for Graham and Astrag to pass through. On his way to the market's Graham had a transitory glance of a long, narrow white-walled room in which men in the universal blue canvas were carrying covered things like beers, and about which men in medical purple hurried to and fro. From this room came groans and wailing. He had an impression of an empty, blood-stained couch, of men on other couches, bandaged and blood-stained. It was just such a glimpse from a railed footway, and then a buttress hid the place and they were going on towards the markets. The roar of the multitude was near now. It leapt to thunder. And arresting his attention, a fluttering of black banners, the waving of blue canvas and brown rags, and the swarming vastness of the theatre near the public markets came into view down a long passage. The picture opened out. He perceived they were entering the last great theatre of his first appearance, the great theatre he had last seen as a checkerwork of glare and blackness in his flight from the Red Police. This time he entered it along a gallery, at a level high above the stage. The place was now brilliantly lit again. His eyes sought the gangway up which he had fled, but he could not tell it from among its dozens of fellows. Nor could he see anything of the smashed seats, deflated cushions, and such-like traces of the fight because of the density of the people. Except the stage the whole place was closely packed. Looking down the effect was a vast area of stippled pink, each dot a still upturned face regarding him. At his appearance with awestrogged the cheering died away, the singing died away, a common interest stilled and unified the disorder. It seemed as though every individual of those myriads was watching him. CHAPTER XIII. OF THE SLEEPER AWAKES. So far as Graham was able to judge, it was near midday when the white banner of the council fell. But some hours had to elapse before it was possible to affect the formal capitulation, and so after he had spoken his word, he retired to his new apartments in the wind-vane offices. The continuous excitement of the last twelve hours had left him inordinately fatigued. Even his curiosity was exhausted. For a space he sat inert and passive with open eyes, and for a space he slept. He was roused by two medical attendants, come prepared with stimulants to sustain him through the next occasion. After he had taken their drugs and bathed by their advice in cold water, he felt a rapid return of interest and energy, and was presently able and willing to accompany awestrogged through several miles, as it seemed, of passages, lifts and slides to the closing scene of the white council's rule. The way ran deviously through a maze of buildings. They came at last to a passage that curved about and showed, broadening before him, an oblong opening, clouds hot with sunset, and the ragged skyline of the ruinous council house. A tumult of shouts came drifting up to him. In another moment, they had come out high up on the brow of the cliff of torn buildings that overhung the wreckage. The vast area opened to Graham's eyes, nonetheless strange and wonderful for the remote view he had had of it in the oval mirror. This rudely amphitheateral space seemed now the better part of a mile to its outer edge. It was gold-lit on the left hand, catching the sunlight, and below and to the right, clear and cold in the shadow. Above the shadowy gray council house that stood in the midst of it, the great black banner of the surrender still hung in sluggish folds against the blazing sunset. Severed rooms, halls, and passages gaped strangely. Broken masses of metal projected dismally from the complex wreckage. Vast masses of twisted cable dropped like tangled seaweed, and from its base came a tumult of innumerable voices, violent concussions, and the sound of trumpets. All about this great white pile was a ring of desolation, the smashed and blackened masses, the gaunt foundations and ruinous lumber of the fabric that had been destroyed by the council's orders, skeletons of girders, titanic masses of wall, forests of stout pillars. Amongst the somber wreckage beneath, running water flashed and glistened, and far away across the space, out of the midst of a vague, vast mass of buildings, there thrust a 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 clamored 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 they were pressing and swaying towards the central space. The upper stories 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 here. He 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, gathering volume came up to him as a 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 organization, 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 circum adjacent buildings were innumerable people, and their voices, even when they were not cheering, were as the sulfing 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, once 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 crowds swelled to a deafening tumult. He saw the counselors first a far off in the glare of one of the temporary lights that marked their path, a little group of white figures 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 mandatory 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 halls of Atlas. Presently he could recognize several of them, the man who had wrapped 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 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 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 Councilors, and then he looked up at the familiar quiet stars overhead. The marvelous 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, end of Chapter 13, Recording by Robert Flock, www.allauthors.com Chapter 14 From the Crow's Nest And so, after strange delays and through an avenue of doubt and battle, this man from the 19th 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 recognize 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 the owner of the world, master of the earth. This new great age was in the completest sense, his. He no longer hoped to discover his experience as 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 calls his attention to the voice of Ostrog, making polite inquiries. 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 Vein 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 wind-vein keeper. To this Graham was conducted by his attendant, Lincoln, with a graceful compliment to the attendant. Apologize 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. They were specula on rapport with the wind-vein 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 ovals of ruins about the House of Council and the black flag of the surrender that flew 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 airplanes to the 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 veins 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 veins, 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. Windwheels, similar to those he saw, and bearing like them 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, his property, 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 Thames, 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 seawater, 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 seawater for the sewers, and in three separate directions ran pallid lines, the road stippled with moving gray specks. On the first occasion that offered, he was determined to go out and see these roads. They 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 edomite, 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 from one to six miles a minute. Railroads had vanished, a few embankments remained as rust crown trenches here and there. Some few formed the cores of edomite 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 great aeroplanes were to be seen, their passages had ceased, and only one little seeming monoplane circled high in the blue distance above the Surrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring spec. 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 cultivation and preserved the name of a town as a Bournemouth, Warrum, or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable such a change had been. The old order had dotted the countryside with farmhouses, and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's estate and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocery shop and the church, the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town where lawyer, corn merchant, wood stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon, doctor, draper, milliner, and so forth lived. Every eight miles simply because that eight-mile marketing journey for, there, and back was as much as was comfortable for the farmer, but directly the railways came into play and after them the light railways, and all the swift new motorcars that had replaced wagons and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to be made of wood and rubber and edamite and all sorts of elastic durable substances, the necessity for having such frequent market towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer with their suggestion of an infinite ocean of labour. As the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanism of living increased, life in the country had become more and more costly or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of Vicarin Squire, the extinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist, had robbed the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster, and letter. To live outside the range of the electric cables was to live in isolated savage. In the country there were neither means of being clothed nor fed according to the refined conceptions of the time, no efficient doctors for an emergency, no company and no pursuits. Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer the equivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the city clerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of the coley foulness of its heirs, the labourers now came to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again in the morning. The city had swallowed up humanity. Man had entered upon a new stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, then had followed the agriculturalist of the agricultural state whose towns and cities and ports were but the headquarters and markets of the countryside, and now logical consequence of an epoch of invention was this huge new aggregation of men. Such things as these simple statements of fact, though they were to contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture, and when he glanced over beyond there at the strange things that existed on the continent it failed him altogether. He had a vision of city beyond city, cities on great plains, cities beside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margins, cities girdled by snowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue was spoken, taken together with its Spanish-American and Hindu and Negro and Pigeon dialects. It was the everyday language of two thirds of humanity. On the continent, save as remote and curious survivals, three other languages alone held sway. German, which reached to Antioch and Genoa, and jostled Spanish-English at Kadeth, a Galicized Russian, which met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan, and the Pigeon English in Peking, and French, still clear and brilliant, the language of lucidity, which shared the Mediterranean with the Indian English and German, and reached through a Negro dialect to the Congo. And everywhere now, through the city-set earth, save in the administered black belt territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan social organization prevailed, and everywhere from pole to equator, his property and his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilized, the whole world dwelt in cities. The whole world was his property. Out of the dim southwest, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in some ways terrible, shone those pleasure cities of which the Kamatograph phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken. Strange places, reminiscent of the legendary Sibiris, cities of art and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile, wonderful cities of motion and music, wither repaired all who profited by the fierce, inglorious economic struggle that went on in the glaring labyrinth below. Fierce, he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact that these Latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenth century as the figure of an idyllic, easy-going life, he turned his eyes to the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the big factories of that intricate maze. Thus concludes Chapter Fourteenth of The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells read by Nat Johnson Rockport, Massachusetts. Chapter Fifteen of The Sleeper Awakes This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by M. B. The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells Chapter Fifteen Prominent People The state apartments of the Wind Veinkeeper would have astonished Graham had he entered them fresh from his nineteenth century life, but already he was growing accustomed to the scale of the new time. He came out through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a plateau of landing at the head of a flight of very broad and gentle steps, with men and women far more brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen, ascending and descending. From this position he looked down upon a vista of subtle and varied ornament in lustrous white and mauve and purple, spanned by bridges that seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and terminating far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens. Glancing upward he saw tier above tier of ascending galleries with faces looking down upon him. The air was full of the babble of innumerable voices and of a music that descended from above, a gay and exhilarating music whose source he did not discover. The central aisle was thick with people, but by no means uncomfortably crowded. Altogether that assembly must have numbered many thousands. They were brilliantly, even fantastically, dressed, the men as fancifully as the women, for the sobering influence of the puritan conception of dignity upon masculine dress had long since passed away. The hair of the men, too, though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled in a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness had vanished from the earth. Frizzy, straight cut masses that would have charmed Rosetti abounded, and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham under the mysterious title of an amourist, wore his hair in two becoming plates, Allah Margarit. The pigtail was in evidence. It would seem that citizens of Chinese extraction were no longer ashamed of their race. There was little uniformity of fashion apparent in the forms of clothing worn. The more shapely men displayed their symmetry in truncose, and here were puffs and sashes, and they're a cloak and they're a robe. The fashions of the days of Leo X were perhaps the prevailing influence, but the aesthetic conceptions of the far east were also patent. Masculine and bonpoint, which in Victorian times would have been subjected to the buttoned perils, the ruthless exaggeration of tight-legged, tight-armed evening-dress, now formed but the basis of a wealth of dignity and drooping folds. Graceful slenderness abounded also. To Graham, a typically stiff man from a typically stiff period, not only did these men seem altogether too graceful in person, but altogether too expressive in their vividly expressive faces. They gesticulated. They expressed surprise, interest, amusement, above all they expressed the emotions excited in their minds by the ladies about them with astonishing frankness. Even at the first glance it was evident that women were in a great majority. The ladies in the company of these gentlemen displayed in dress, bearing, and manner alike less emphasis and more intricacy. Some affected a classical simplicity of robing and subtlety of fold after the fashion of the First French Empire and flashed conquering arms and shoulders as Graham passed. Others had closely fitting dresses without seam or belt at the waist, sometimes with long folds falling from their shoulders. The delightful confidences of evening dress had not been diminished by the passage of two centuries. Everyone's movements seemed graceful. Graham remarked to Lincoln that he saw men as Raphael's cartoons walking, and Lincoln told him that the attainment of an appropriate set of gestures was part of every rich person's education. The master's entry was greeted with a sort of tittering applause, but these people showed their distinguished manners by not crowding upon him, nor annoying him by any persistent scrutiny as he descended the steps towards the floor of the aisle. He had already learnt from Lincoln that these were the leaders of existing London society. Almost every person there that night was either a powerful official or the immediate connection of a powerful official. Many had returned from the European pleasure cities expressly to welcome him. The Aeronautic authorities, whose defection had played a part in the overthrow of the Council only second to Graham's, were very prominent, and so too was the wind vane control. Amongst others there were several of the more prominent officers of the food department. The controller of the European Piggeries had a particularly melancholy and interesting countenance and a daintily cynical manner. A bishop in full canonicals passed a thwart Graham's vision, conversing with the gentleman dressed exactly like the traditional Chaucer, including even the Laurel Reef. Who is that? he asked almost involuntarily. The Bishop of London, said Lincoln. No, the other, I mean. Poet Laureate. You still? He doesn't make poetry, of course. He's a cousin of Wharton, one of the counsellors, but he's one of the Red Rose Loyalists, a delightful club, and they keep up the tradition of these things. Asano told me there was a king. The king doesn't belong, they had to expel him. It's the steward blood, I suppose, but really too much? far too much. Graham did not quite follow all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the New Age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner group did Lincoln consider it appropriate to introduce him. The first introduction was the Master Eronaut, a man whose suntan face contrasted oddly with the delicate complexions about him. Just at present, his critical defection from the council made him a very important person indeed. His manner contrasted very favorably, according to Graham's ideas, with the general bearing. He offered a few commonplace remarks, assurances of loyalty and frank inquiries about the Master's health. His manner was breezy, his accent lacked the easy staccato of latter-day English. He made it admirably clear to Graham that he was a bluff aerial dog, he used that phrase, that there was no nonsense about him, that he was a thoroughly manly fellow and old-fashioned at that, that he didn't profess to know much, and that what he did know was not worth knowing. He made a curt bow, ostentatiously free from obsequiousness and past. I'm glad to see that that type endures, said Graham. Photographs and kinematographs, said Lincoln a little spitefully. He is studied from the life. Graham glanced at the burly form again. It was oddly reminiscent. As a matter of fact, we bought him, said Lincoln. Partly, and partly he was afraid of Ostrog. Everything rested with him. He turned sharply to introduce the surveyor general of the public schools. This person was a willowy figure in a blue-gray academic gown. He beamed down upon Graham through pasnay of a Victorian pattern, and illustrated his remarks by gestures of a beautifully manicured hand. Graham was immediately interested in this gentleman's functions, and asked him a number of singularly direct questions. The surveyor general seemed quietly amused at the master's fundamental bluntness. He was a little vague as to the monopoly of education his company possessed. It was done by contract with the syndicate that ran the numerous London municipalities, but he waxed enthusiastic over educational progress since the Victorian times. We have conquered Graham, he said, completely conquered Graham. There is not an examination left in the world, aren't you glad? How do you get the work done? asked Graham. We make it attractive, as attractive as possible, and if it does not attract then, we let it go, we cover an immense field. He proceeded to details, and they had a lengthy conversation. Graham learned that university extensions still existed in a modified form. There is a certain type of girl, for instance, said the surveyor general, dilating with a sense of his usefulness, with a perfect passion for severe studies. When they are not too difficult, you know, we cater for them by the thousand. At this moment, he said with a Napoleonic touch, nearly 500 phonographs are lecturing in different parts of London on the influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Haslett, and Burns, and afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle class of your days has quite passed away. About the public elementary schools, said Graham, do you control them? The surveyor general did, entirely. Now Graham in his later democratic days had taken a keen interest in these, and his questioning quickened. Certain casual phrases that had fallen from the old man with whom he had talked in the darkness recurred to him. The surveyor general, in effect, endorsed the old man's words. We try and make the elementary schools very pleasant for the little children. They will have to work so soon. Just a few simple principles, obedience, industry. You teach them very little? Why should we? It only leads to trouble and discontent. We amuse them. Even as it is, there are troubles, agitations. Where the laborers get the ideas, one cannot tell. They tell one another. There are socialistic dreams, anarchy even. Agitators will get to work among them. I take it, I have always taken it, that my foremost duty is to fight against popular discontent. Why should people be made unhappy? I wonder, said Graham thoughtfully. But there are a great many things I want to know. Lincoln, who had stood watching Graham's face throughout the conversation, intervened. There are others, he said, in an undertone. The surveyor general of schools gesticulated himself away. Perhaps, said Lincoln, intercepting a casual glance, you would like to know some of these ladies? The daughter of the manager of the Piggeries was a particularly charming little person, with red hair and animated blue eyes. Lincoln left him a while to converse with her, and she displayed herself as quite an enthusiast for the dear old days, as she called them, that had seen the beginning of his trance. As she talked, she smiled, and her eyes smiled in a manner that demanded reciprocity. I have tried, she said, countless times, to imagine those old romantic days. And to you, they are memories. How strange and crowded the world must seem to you. I have seen photographs and pictures of the past, and little isolated houses built of bricks made out of burnt mud and all black with soot from your fires. The railway bridges, the simple advertisements, the solemn, savage, puritanical men in strange black coats, and those tall hats of theirs, iron railway trains on iron bridges overhead, horses and cattle, and even dogs running half wild about the streets. And suddenly you have come into this. Into this, said Graham. Out of your life, out of all that was familiar, the old life was not a happy one, said Graham. I do not regret that. She looked at him quickly. There was a brief pause. She sighed encouragingly. No. No, said Graham. It was a little life and unmeaning. But this, we thought the world complex and crowded and civilized enough. Yet I see, although in this world I am barely four days old, looking back on my own time, that it was a queer barbaric time, the mere beginning of this new order. The mere beginning of this new order. You will find it hard to understand how little I know. You may ask me what you like, she said, smiling at him. Then tell me who these people are. I'm still very much in the dark about them. It's puzzling. Are there any generals? Men in hats and feathers? Of course not. No. I suppose they are the men who control the great public businesses. Who is that distinguished looking man? That? He's a most important officer. That is Morden. He is managing director of the Antibilius Pill Department. I have heard that his workers sometimes turn out a myriad, myriad pills a day in the 24 hours. Fancy a myriad, myriad. A myriad, myriad. No wonder he looks proud, said Graham. Pills. What a wonderful time it is. That man in purple? He is not quite one of the inner circle, you know. But we like him. He is really clever and very amusing. He is one of the heads of the medical faculty of our London University. All medical men, you know, wear that purple. But of course, people who are paid by fees for doing something. She smiled away the social pretensions of all such people. Are any of your great artists or authors here? Not authors. They are mostly such queer people, and so preoccupied about themselves, and they quarrel so dreadfully. They will fight some of them for precedence on staircases. Dreadful, isn't it? But I think Raysbury, the fashionable capillotomist, is here. From Capri. Capillotomist, said Graham. I remember. An artist. Why not? We have to cultivate him, she said, apologetically. Our heads are in his hands. She smiled. Graham hesitated at the invited compliment, but his glance was expressive. Have the arts grown with the rest of civilized things, he said? Who are your great painters? She looked at him doubtfully, then laughed. For a moment, she said, I thought you meant she laughed again. You mean, of course, those good men you used to think so much of because they could cover great spaces of canvas with oil colors, great oblongs, and people used to put the things in guilt frames and handing them up in rows in their square rooms. We haven't any. People grew tired of that sort of thing. But what did you think I meant? She put a finger significantly on a cheek whose glow was above suspicion and smiled and looked very arch and pretty and inviting. And here, and she indicated her eyelid. Graham had an adventurous moment. Then a grotesque memory of a picture he had somewhere seen of Uncle Toby and the widow flashed across his mind. An archaic shame came upon him. He became acutely aware that he was visible to a great number of interested people. I see, he remarked inadequately. He turned awkwardly away from her fascinating facility. He looked about him to meet a number of eyes that immediately occupied themselves with other things. Possibly he colored a little. Who is that talking with the lady in saffron? He said, avoiding her eyes. The person in question he learned was one of the great organizers of the American theaters, just fresh from a gigantic production at Mexico. His face reminded Graham of a bust of Caligula. Another striking looking man was the black labor master. The phrase at the time made no deep impression, but afterwards it recurred. The black labor master? The little lady, in no degree embarrassed, pointed out to him a charming little woman as one of the subsidiary wives of the Anglican Bishop of London. She added ecomiums on the Episcopal Courage. Hitherto there had been a rule of clerical monogamy. Neither a natural nor an expedient condition of things. Why should a natural development of the affections be dwarfed and restricted because a man is a priest? And by the by she added, are you an Anglican? Graham was on the verge of hesitating inquiries about the status of a subsidiary wife, apparently a euphemistic phrase, when Lincoln's return broke off this very suggestive and interesting conversation. They crossed the aisle to wear a tall man in crimson and two charming persons in Burmese costume, as it seemed to him, awaited him diffidently. From their civilities he passed two other presentations. In a little while his multitudinous impressions began to organize themselves into a general effect. At first the glitter of the gathering had raised all the Democrat and Graham. He had felt hostile and satirical. But it is not in human nature to resist an atmosphere of courteous regard. Soon the music, the light, the play of colors, the shining arms and shoulders about him, the touch of hands, the transient interest of smiling faces, the frothing sound of skillfully modulated voices, the atmosphere of compliment, interest, and respect had woven together into a fabric of indisputable pleasure. Graham for a time forgot his spacious resolutions. He gave way insensibly to the intoxication of the position that was conceited him. His manner became more convincingly regal. His feet walked assuredly. The black robe fell with a bolder fold, and pride ennobled his voice. After all, this was a brilliant, interesting world. He looked up and saw passing across a bridge of porcelain and looking down upon him, a face that was almost immediately hidden, the face of the girl he had seen overnight in the little room beyond the theater after his escape from the council, and she was watching him. For the moment he did not remember when he had seen her, and then came a vague memory of the stirring emotions of their first encounter. But the dancing web of melody about him kept the air of that great marching song from his memory. The lady to whom he talked repeated her remark, and Graham recalled himself to the quasi-regal flirtation upon which he was engaged. Yet unaccountably, a vague restlessness, a feeling that grew to dissatisfaction, came into his mind. He was troubled as if by some half-forgotten duty, by the sense of things important slipping from him amidst this light and brilliance. The attraction that these ladies who crowded about him were beginning to exercise ceased. He no longer gave vague and clumsy responses to the subtly amorous advances that he was now assured were being made to him, and his eyes wandered for another sight of the girl of the first revolt. Where precisely had he seen her? Graham was in one of the upper galleries in conversation with a bright-eyed lady on the subject of Edomite. The subject was his choice, and not hers. He had interrupted her warm assurance of personal devotion with a matter-of-fact inquiry. He found her, as he had already found several other latter-day women that night, less well-informed than charming. Suddenly, struggling against the eddying drift of nearer melody, the song of the revolt, the great song he had heard in the hall, hoarse and massive, came beating down to him. Ah, now he remembered. He glanced up, startled, and perceived above him an euthy booth through which this song had come, and beyond the upper courses of cable, the blue haze, and the pendant fabric of the lights of the public ways. He heard the song break into a tumult of voices and cease. He perceived quite clearly the drone and tumult of the moving platforms, and a murmur of many people. He had a vague persuasion that he could not account for, a sort of instinctive feeling that outside in the ways a huge crowd must be watching this place in which their master amused himself. Though the song had stopped so abruptly, though the special music of this gathering reasserted itself, the motif of the marching song, once it had begun, lingered in his mind. The bright-eyed lady was still struggling with the mysteries of Edomite, when he perceived the girl he had seen in the theatre again. She was coming now along the gallery towards him. He saw her first before she saw him. She was dressed in a faintly luminous grey. Her dark hair about her brows was like a cloud, and as he saw her the cold light from the circular opening into the ways fell upon her downcast face. The lady in trouble about the Edomite saw the change in his expression, and grasped her opportunity to escape. Would you care to know that girl, Sire? She asked boldly. She is Helen Wharton, a niece of the Ostrogs. She knows a great many serious things. She is one of the most serious persons alive. I am sure you will like her. In another moment Graham was talking to the girl, and the bright-eyed lady had fluttered away. I remember you quite well, said Graham. You were in that little room, when all the people were singing and beating time with their feet, before I walked across the hall. Her momentary embarrassment passed. She looked up at him, and her face was steady. It was wonderful, she said, hesitated, and spoke with a sudden effort. All those people would have died for you, Sire. Countless people did die for you that night. Her face glowed. She glanced swiftly aside to see that no other heard her words. Lincoln appeared some way off along the gallery, making his way through the press towards them. She saw him and turned to Graham, strangely eager with a swift change to confidence and intimacy. Sire, she said quickly, I cannot tell you now and here, but the common people are very unhappy. They are oppressed. They are misgoverned. Do not forget the people who faced death, death that you might live. I know nothing, began Graham. I cannot tell you now. Lincoln's face appeared close to them. He bowed an apology to the girl. You find the new world amusing, Sire, said Lincoln, with smiling deference, and indicating the space and splendor of the gathering by one comprehensive gesture. At any rate, you find it changed. Yes, said Graham, changed, and yet, after all, not so greatly changed. Wait till you are in the air, said Lincoln. The wind has fallen. Even now an airplane awaits you. The girl's attitude awaited dismissal. Graham glanced at her face, was on the verge of a question, found a warning in her expression, bowed to her, and turned to accompany Lincoln. End of Chapter 15. Chapter 16 of The Sleeper Awakes. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by M.B. The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells. Chapter 16. The Monoplane. The flying stages of London were collected together in an irregular crescent on the southern side of the river. They formed three groups of two each, and retained the names of ancient suburban hills or villages. They were named in order Roehampton, Wimbledon Park, Stratum, Norwood, Blackheath, and Shooters Hill. They were uniform structures rising high above the general roof surfaces. Each was about 4,000 yards long and 1,000 broad, and constructed at the compound of aluminum and iron that had replaced iron in architecture. Their higher tiers formed an open work of girders through which lifts and staircases ascended. The upper surface was a uniform expanse with portions, the starting carriers, that could be raised and were then able to run on very slightly inclined rails to the end of the fabric. Graham went to the flying stages by the public ways. He was accompanied by Asano, his Japanese attendant. Lincoln was called away by Ostrog, who was busy with his administrative concerns. A strong guard of wind vane police awaited the master outside the wind vane offices, and they cleared a space for him on the upper moving platform. His passage to the flying stages was unexpected. Nevertheless, a considerable crowd gathered and followed him to his destination. As he went along, he could hear the people shouting his name and saw a numberless men and women and children in blue come swarming up the staircases in the central path, gesticulating and shouting. He could not hear what they shouted. He was struck again by the evident existence of a vulgar dialect among the poor of the city. When at last he descended, his guards were immediately surrounded by a dense, excited crowd. Afterwards it occurred to him that some had attempted to reach him with petitions. His guards cleared a passage for him with difficulty. He found a monoplane in charge of an aeronaut awaiting him on the westward stage. Seen close, this mechanism was no longer small. As it lay on its launching carrier upon the wide expanse of the flying stage, its aluminum body skeleton was as big as the hull of a 20 ton yacht. Its lateral supporting sails braced and stayed with metal nerves almost like the nerves of a bee's wing, and made of some sort of glassy artificial membrane cast their shadow over many hundreds of square yards. The chairs for the engineer and his passenger hung free to swing by a complex tackle within the protecting ribs of the frame and well abaffed the middle. The passengers chair was protected by a wind guard and guarded about with metallic rods carrying air cushions. It could, if desired, be completely closed in, but Graham was anxious for novel experiences and desired that it should be left open. The aeronaut sat behind a glass that sheltered his face. The passenger could secure himself firmly in his seat, and this was almost unavoidable on landing, or he could move along by means of a little rail and rod to a locker at the stem of the machine, where his personal luggage, his wraps and restoratives were placed, and which also with the seats served as a make weight to the parts of the central engine that projected to the propeller at the stern. The flying stage about him was empty save for Osano and their suite of attendants. Directed by the aeronaut he placed himself in his seat. Osano stepped through the bars of the hull and stood below on the stage waving his hand. He seemed to slide along the stage to the right and vanish. The engine was humming loudly, the propeller spinning, and for a second the stage and the buildings beyond were gliding swiftly and horizontally past Graham's eye. Then these things seemed to tilt up abruptly. He gripped the little rods on either side of him instinctively. He felt himself moving upward, hood the air whistle over the top of the windscreen. The propeller screw moved with powerful rhythmic impulses. One, two, three, pause, one, two, three, which the engineer controlled very delicately. The machine began equivering vibration that continued throughout the flight, and the roof areas seemed running away to starboard very quickly and growing rapidly smaller. He looked from the face of the engineer through the ribs of the machine. Looking sideways, there was nothing very startling in what he saw. A rapid funicular railway might have given the same sensations. He recognized the council house and the Highgate Ridge, and then he looked straight down between his feet. For a moment, physical terror possessed him, a passionate sense of insecurity. He held tight. For a second or so, he could not lift his eyes. Some hundred feet or more sheer below him was one of the big wind veins of Southwest London, and beyond it the southernmost flying stage crowded with little black dots. These things seemed to be falling away from him. For a second, he had an impulse to pursue the earth. He set his teeth. He lifted his eyes by a muscular effort, and the moment of panic passed. He remained for a space with his teeth set hard, his eyes staring into the sky. Throb, throb, throb, beat, went the engine. Throb, throb, throb, beat. He grabbed his bars tightly, glanced at the aeronaut, and saw a smile upon his suntanned face. He smiled in return, perhaps a little artificially. A little strange at first, he shouted before he recalled his dignity. But he dared not look down again for some time. He stared over the aeronaut's head to where a rim of vague blue horizon crept up the sky. For a little while, he could not banish the thought of possible accidents from his mind. Throb, throb, throb, beat. Suppose some trivial screw went wrong in that supporting engine. Suppose he made a grim effort to dismiss all such suppositions. After a while, they did at least abandon the foreground of his thoughts. And up he went steadily, higher and higher into the clear air. Once the mental shock of moving unsupported through the air was over, his sensation ceased to be unpleasant, became very speedily pleasurable. He had been warned of air sickness, but he found the pulsating movement of the monoplane as it drove up the faint southwest breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration. He looked up and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of white birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space he watched these. Then, going lower and less apprehensively, he saw the slender figure of the wind vane keeper's crow's nest shining golden in the sunlight and growing smaller every moment. As his eye fell with more confidence now, there came a blue line of hills, and then London, already to leeward, an intricate space of roofing. Its near edge came sharp and clear, and banished his last apprehensions in a shock of surprise. For the boundary of London was like a wall, like a cliff, a steep fall of three or four hundred feet, a frontage broken only by terraces here and there, a complex decorative facade. The gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it here, but a waste of ruins, variegated and dense with thickets of the heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed along levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges of houses. But for the most part, the reefs and scaries of ruins, the wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads. Queer islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial it seemed to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms of the time. The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the countless cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of the city wall in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teasel and tall grasses. Here and there, gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst the puny remains of Victorian times, and cableways slanted to them from the city. That winter day they seemed deserted. Deserted too were the artificial gardens among the ruins. The city limits were indeed as sharply defined as in the ancient days when the gates were shot at nightfall, and the robber of fomen prowled through the very walls. A huge semi-circular throat poured out of vigorous traffic upon the Edomite Bath Road. So the first prospect of the world beyond the city flashed on Graham, and dwindled. And when at last he could look vertically downward again, he saw below him the vegetable fields of the Thames Valley, innumerable minute oblongs of ruddy brown intersected by shining threads, the sewage ditches. His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication. He found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring to shout, after a time that desire became too strong for him, and he shouted. They curved about towards the south. They drove with a slight list leeward, and with a slow alteration of movement, first a short, sharp ascent, and then a long downward glide that was very swift and pleasing. During these downward glides, the propeller was inactive altogether. These ascents gave Graham a glorious sense of successful effort. The descents through the rarefied air were beyond all experience. He wanted never to leave the upper air again. For a time he was intent upon the landscape that ran swiftly northward beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once dotted the country, by the vast, treeless expanse of country from which all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter. He tried to make out familiar places within the hollow basin of the world below, but at first he could distinguish no data now that the Thames Valley was left behind. Soon, however, they were driving over a sharp, chalk hill that he recognized as Guildford Hogg's back, because of the familiar outline of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of the ruins of the town that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge. And from that he made out other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes of alder shot, and so forth. Save where the broad Edomite Portsmouth Road, thickly dotted with rushing shapes, followed the course of the old railway, the gorge of the way was choked with thickets. The whole expanse of the down's escarpment, so far as the gray haze permitted him to see, was set with wind wheels to which the largest of the city was but a younger brother. They stirred with a stately motion before the southwest wind, and here and there were patches dotted with the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted shepherd made a spot of black. Then rushing under the stern of the plain came the wielden heights, the line of hind head, pitch hill, and Leith Hill, were the second row of wind wheels that seemed striving to rob the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men. Swiftly these swept behind, and dwindled and lost color, and became scarce moving specks that were swallowed up in haze. And when these had vanished in the distance, Graham heard a pewitt wailing close at hand. He perceived he was now above the south down's, and staring over his shoulder he saw the battlements of Portsmouth Landing stage towering over the ridge of Portsdown Hill. In another moment there came into sight a spread of shipping like floating cities, the little white cliffs of the needles dwarfed and sunlit, and the gray and glittering waters of the narrow sea. They seemed to leap the Solent in a moment, and in a few seconds the Isle of White was running past, and then beneath him spread a wider and wider extent of sea, here purple with the shadow of a cloud, here gray, here a burnished mirror, and here a spread of cloudy greenish blue. The Isle of White grew smaller and smaller. In a few more minutes a strip of gray haze detached itself from other strips that were clouds, descended out of the sky and became a coastline, sunlit and pleasant, the coast of northern France. It rose, it took color, became definite and detailed, and the counterpart of the downland of England was speeding by below. In a little time, as it seemed, Paris came above the horizon and hung there for a space, and sank out of sight again as the monoplane circled about to the north, but he perceived the Eiffel Tower still standing, and beside it a huge dome surmounted by a pinpoint colossus, and he perceived, too, though he did not understand it at the time, a slanting drift of smoke. The Aeronaut said something about trouble in the underways, that Graham did not heed, but he marked the minarets and towers and slender masses that streamed skyward above the city wind veins, and knew that in the matter of grace, at least, Paris still kept in front of her larger rival. And even as he looked, a pale blue shape ascended very swiftly from the city, like a dead leaf driving up before a gale. It curved round and soared towards them, growing rapidly larger and larger. The Aeronaut was saying something. What, said Graham, loathed to take his eyes from this. London aeroplane, sire, bawled the Aeronaut, pointing. They rose and curved about northward as it drew nearer. Nearer it came, and nearer, larger and larger. The throb, throb, throb beat of the monoplane's flight, that had seemed so potent, and so swift, suddenly appeared slow by comparison with this tremendous rush. How great the monster seemed! How swift and steady! It passed quite closely beneath them, driving along silently, a vast spread of wirenetted translucent wings, a thing alive. Graham had a momentary glimpse of the rows and rows of wrapped up passengers, slung in their little cradles behind windscreens, of a white clothed engineer crawling against the gale along the ladderway, of spouting engines beating together, of the whirling windscrew, and of a wide waste of wing. He exalted in the sight, and in an instant the thing had passed. It rose slightly, and their own little wing swayed in the rush of its flight. It fell and grew smaller. Scarcely had they moved as it seemed, before it was again only a flat blue thing that dwindled in the sky. This was the aeroplane that went to and fro between London and Paris. In fair weather and in peaceful times, it came and went four times a day. They beat across the channel, slowly as it seemed now to Graham's enlarged ideas, and beachy head rose grayly to the left of them. Land! called the aeronaut, his voice small against the whistling of the air over the windscreen. Not yet, bawled Graham, laughing. Not land yet. I want to learn more of this machine. I meant, said the aeronaut, I want to learn more of this machine, repeated Graham. I'm coming to you, he said, and had flung himself free of his chair and taken a step along the guarded rail between them. He stopped for a moment, and his color changed and his hands tightened. Another step and he was clinging close to the aeronaut. He felt a weight on his shoulder, the pressure of the air. His hat was a whirling speck behind. The wind came in gusts over his windscreen and blew his hair and streamers past his cheek. The aeronaut made some hasty adjustments for the shifting of the centers of gravity and pressure. I want to have these things explained, said Graham. What do you do when you move that engine forward? The aeronaut hesitated. Then he answered, they are complex, sire. I don't mind, shouted Graham. I don't mind. There was a moment's pause. Aeronautics is the secret, the privilege. I know, but I'm the master, and I mean to know. He laughed, full of this novel realization of power that was his gift from the upper air. The monoplane curved about, and the keen fresh wind cut across Graham's face, and his garment lugged at his body as the stem pointed round to the west. The two men looked into each other's eyes. Sire, there are rules. Not where I am concerned, said Graham, you seem to forget. The aeronaut scrutinized his face. No, he said. I do not forget, sire, but in all the earth, no man who is a sworn aeronaut has ever a chance. They come as passengers. I have heard something of the sort, but I'm not going to argue these points. Do you know why I have slept 200 years? To fly. Sire, said the aeronaut. The rules, if I break the rules, Graham waved the penalties aside. Then if you will watch me, no, said Graham, swaying and gripping tight as the machine lifted its nose again for an ascent. That's not my game. I want to do it myself. Do it myself if I smash for it. No, I will. See, I'm going to clamber by this to come and share your seat. Steady? I mean to fly of my own accord if I smash at the end of it. I will have something to pay for my sleep, of all other things. In my past, it was my dream to fly. Now, keep your balance. A dozen spies are watching me, sire. Graham's temper was at an end. Perhaps he chose it should be. He swore. He swung himself round the intervening mass of levers and the monoplane swayed. Am I master of the earth, he said? Or is it your society? Now, take your hands off those levers and hold my wrists. Yes, so. And now, how do we turn her nose down to the glide? Sire, said the aeronaut. What is it? You will protect me. Lord, yes, if I have to burn London now. And with that promise, Graham bought his first lesson in aerial navigation. It's clearly to your advantage, this journey, he said with a loud laugh, for the air was like strong wine. To teach me quickly and well. Do I pull this? Ah, so, hello. Back sire, back. Back, right. One, two, three, good God. Ah, up she goes. But this is living. And now the machine began to dance the strangest figures in the air. Now it would sweep round a spiral of scarcely a hundred yards diameter. Now rush up into the air and swoop down again, steeply swiftly falling like a hawk to recover in a rushing loop that swept it high again. In one of these descents, it seemed driving straight at the drifting park of balloons in the southeast and only curved about and cleared them by a sudden recovery of dexterity. The extraordinary swiftness and smoothness of the motion, the extraordinary effect of the rarefied air upon his constitution, threw Graham into a careless fury. But at last a queer incident came to sober him, to send him flying down once more to the crowded life below with all its dark insoluble riddles. As he swooped came a tap and something flying past and a drop like a drop of rain. Then as he went down he saw something like a white rag whirling down in his wake. What was that? He asked. I did not see. The aeronaut glanced and then clutched at the lever to recover for they were sweeping down. When the monoplane was rising again he drew a deep breath and replied, that, and he indicated the white thing still fluttering down, was a swan. I never saw it, said Graham. The aeronaut made no answer and Graham saw little drops upon his forehead. They drove horizontally while Graham clambered back to the passenger's place out of the lash of the wind. And then came a swift rush down with the wind screw whirling to check their fall and the flying stage growing broad and dark before them. The sun, sinking over the chalk hills in the west, flew with them and left the sky a blaze of gold. Soon men could be seen as little specks. He heard a noise coming up to meet him, a noise like the sound of waves upon a pebbly beach, and saw that the roofs of the flying stage were dense with his people rejoicing over his safe return. A black mass was crushed together under the stage, a darkness stippled with innumerable faces and quivering with the minute oscillation of waved white handkerchiefs and waving hands. End of Chapter 16