desperately invisible you could grasp a corner
of it, lift the dark veil, and learn a little of what was the doom of
those who have vanished. What happened to them?

It cannot be guessed. House fronts have collapsed in rubble across the
road. There is a smell of opened vaults. All the homes are blind. Their
eyes have been put out. Many of the buildings are without roofs, and
their walls have come down to raw serrations. Slates and tiles have
avalanched into the street, or the roof itself is entire, but has
dropped sideways over the ruin below as a drunken cap over the
dissolute. The lower floors are heaps of damp mortar and bricks. Very
rarely a solitary picture hangs awry on the wall of a house where there
is no other sign that it was ever inhabited. I saw in such a room the
portrait of a child who in some moment long ago laughed while it
clasped a dog in a garden. You continue to gaze at a sign like that,
you don't know why, as though something you cannot name might be
divined, if you could but hit upon the key to the spell. What is the
name of the evil that has fallen on mankind?

The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of
the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the
crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A
rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage,
and ugly litter and fragments. It is the flies which find these gardens
pleasant. Theirs is now the only voice of Summer, as though they were
loathly in the mouth of Summer's carcase. It is perplexing to find how
little remains of the common things of the household: a broken doll, a
child's boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a
corn-chandler's ledger.

It was lying open in the muck of the roadway, wet and discoloured. Till
that moment I had not come to the point of believing the place. The
town was not humane. It was not credible. It might have been, for all I
could tell, a simulacrum of the work of men. Perhaps it was the patient
and particular mimicry of us by an unknown power, a power which was
alarmingly interested in our doings; and in a frenzy over its partial
failure it had attempted to demolish its laborious semblance of what we
do. Was this power still observant of its work, and conscious of
intruders? All this was a sinister warning of something invisible and
malign, which brooded over our affairs, knew us too well, though
omitting t