ical 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
Ostrog 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, none the less strange and wonderful for the remote view he had had
of it in the oval mirror.

This rudely amphitheatral 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 grey 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 sombre 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 the twisted end of a water-main,
two hundred feet in the air, thunderously spouting a shining cascade.
And everywhere great multitudes of people.

Wherever there was space and foothold, people swarmed, little people,
small and minutely clear, except where the sunset touched them to
indistinguishable gold. They clambered up the tottering walls, they
clung in wreaths and groups about the high-standing pillars. They
swarmed along the edges of the circle of ruins. The