might have been part of a boat, but I could not tell. I began to
feel that I had missed the world. It would be a strange thing to
travel from far away to see London and not be able to find it among
all the roads that lead there, but I seemed to have travelled in Time
and to have missed it among the centuries. And when as I wandered
over the grassy hills I came on a wattled shrine that was thatched
with straw and saw a lion in it more worn with time than even the
Sphinx at Gizeh and when I knew it for one of the four in Trafalgar
Square then I saw that I was stranded far away in the future with many
centuries of treacherous years between me and anything that I had
known. And then I sat on the grass by the worn paws of the lion to
think out what to do. And I decided to go back through Go-by Street
and, since there was nothing left to keep me any more to the fields we
know, to offer myself as a servant in the palace of Singanee, and to
see again the face of Saranoora and those famous, wonderful,
amethystine dawns upon the abyss where the golden dragons play. And I
stayed no longer to look for remains of the ruins of London; for there
is little pleasure in seeing wonderful things if there is no one at
all to hear of them and to wonder. So I returned at once to Go-by
Street, the little row of huts, and saw no other record that London
had been except that one stone lion. I went to the right house this
time. It was very much altered and more like one of those huts that
one sees on Salisbury plain than a shop in the city of London, but I
found it by counting the houses in the street for it was still a row
of houses though pavement and city were gone. And it was still a shop.
A very different shop to the one I knew, but things were for sale
there--shepherd's crooks, food, and rude axes. And a man with long
hair was there who was clad in skins. I did not speak to him for I did
not know his language. He said to me something that sounded like
"Everkike." It conveyed no meaning to me; but when he looked towards
one of his buns, light suddenly dawned in my mind, and I knew that
England was even England still and that still she was not conquered,
and that though they had tired of London they still held to their
land; for the words that the man had said were, "Av er kike," and then
I knew that that very language that was carried to distant lands by
the old, triumphant cockney was spoken still in his birthplace and
that neithe