llously active offices could be, then he
detected the noise of the presses and emitted his "Gaw!"

Beyond these newspaper buildings again, and partially hidden by the
arches of the old Elevated Railway of New York (long since converted
into a mono-rail), there was another cordon of police and a sort of
encampment of ambulances and doctors, busy with the dead and wounded who
had been killed early in the night by the panic upon Brooklyn Bridge.
All this he saw in the perspectives of a bird's-eye view, as things
happening in a big, irregular-shaped pit below him, between cliffs of
high building. Northward he looked along the steep canon of Broadway,
down whose length at intervals crowds were assembling about excited
speakers; and when he lifted his eyes he saw the chimneys and
cable-stacks and roof spaces of New York, and everywhere now over these
the watching, debating people clustered, except where the fires raged
and the jets of water flew. Everywhere, too, were flagstaffs devoid of
flags; one white sheet drooped and flapped and drooped again over the
Park Row buildings. And upon the lurid lights, the festering movement
and intense shadows of this strange scene, there was breaking now the
cold, impartial dawn.

For Bert Smallways all this was framed in the frame of the open
porthole. It was a pale, dim world outside that dark and tangible
rim. All night he had clutched at that rim, jumped and quivered at
explosions, and watched phantom events. Now he had been high and now
low; now almost beyond hearing, now flying close to crashings and shouts
and outcries. He had seen airships flying low and swift over darkened
and groaning streets; watched great buildings, suddenly red-lit amidst
the shadows, crumple at the smashing impact of bombs; witnessed for
the first time in his life the grotesque, swift onset of insatiable
conflagrations. From it all he felt detached, disembodied. The Vaterland
did not even fling a bomb; she watched and ruled. Then down they had
come at last to hover over City Hall Park, and it had crept in upon his
mind, chillingly, terrifyingly, that these illuminated black masses
were great offices afire, and that the going to and fro of minute, dim
spectres of lantern-lit grey and white was a harvesting of the wounded
and the dead. As the light grew clearer he began to understand more and
more what these crumpled black things signified....

He had watched hour after hour since first New York had risen out