into a remote diapering at the foot of the
distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children
of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked
slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with
stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour Company's
field workers in huge wheeled mechanical vehicles, were hurrying back to
their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen
little private aeroplanes sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene
as it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have filled the
minds of their ancestors with incredulous amazement. Denton's thoughts
fluttered towards the future in a vain attempt at what that scene might
be in another two hundred years, and, recoiling, turned towards the
past.

He shared something of the growing knowledge of the time; he could
picture the quaint smoke-grimed Victorian city with its narrow little
roads of beaten earth, its wide common-land, ill-organised, ill-built
suburbs, and irregular enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart
times, with its little villages and its petty London; the England of the
monasteries, the far older England of the Roman dominion, and then
before that a wild country with here and there the huts of some warring
tribe. These huts must have come and gone and come again through a space
of years that made the Roman camp and villa seem but yesterday; and
before those years, before even the huts, there had been men in the
valley. Even then--so recent had it all been when one judged it by the
standards of geological time--this valley had been here; and those hills
yonder, higher, perhaps, and snow-tipped, had still been yonder hills,
and the Thames had flowed down from the Cotswolds to the sea. But the
men had been but the shapes of men, creatures of darkness and ignorance,
victims of beasts and floods, storms and pestilence and incessant
hunger. They had held a precarious foothold amidst bears and lions and
all the monstrous violence of the past. Already some at least of these
enemies were overcome....

For a time Denton pursued the thoughts of this spacious vision, trying
in obedience to his instinct to find his place and proportion in the
scheme.

"It has been chance," he said, "it has been luck. We have come through.
It happens we have come through. Not by any strength of our own....

"And yet ... No. I don't know."

He was silent for a