d Graham's guide, and they avoided
an endless band running roaring up to the shaft of the vane. "This way!"
and they were ankle deep in a gutter full of drifted thawing snow,
between two low walls of metal that presently rose waist high. "I will go
first," said the guide. Graham drew his cloak about him and followed.
Then suddenly came a narrow abyss across which the gutter leapt to the
snowy darkness of the further side. Graham peeped over the side once and
the gulf was black. For a moment he regretted his flight. He dared not
look again, and his brain spun as he waded through the half liquid snow.

Then out of the gutter they clambered and hurried across a wide flat
space damp with thawing snow, and for half its extent dimly translucent
to lights that went to and fro underneath. He hesitated at this unstable
looking substance, but his guide ran on unheeding, and so they came to
and clambered up slippery steps to the rim of a great dome of glass.
Round this they went. Far below a number of people seemed to be dancing,
and music filtered through the dome.... Graham fancied he heard a
shouting through the snowstorm, and his guide hurried him on with a new
spurt of haste. They clambered panting to a space of huge windmills, one
so vast that only the lower edge of its vanes came rushing into sight and
rushed up again and was lost in the night and the snow. They hurried for
a time through the colossal metallic tracery of its supports, and came at
last above a place of moving platforms like the place into which Graham
had looked from the balcony. They crawled across the sloping transparency
that covered this street of platforms, crawling on hands and knees
because of the slipperiness of the snowfall.

For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy
suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent
roof the glass was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down
upon it all. For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave
way to vertigo and lay spread-eagled on the glass, sick and paralysed.
Far below, mere stirring specks and dots, went the people of the
unsleeping city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving platforms
ran on their incessant journey. Messengers and men on unknown
businesses shot along the drooping cables and the frail bridges were
crowded with men. It was like peering into a gigantic glass hive, and
it lay vertically below him with only a tough glass of