t duskily, bearing down the jarring
ice-blocks, and as one looked on the black water from the bridges it was
like a river in a northern tale. To Lucian it all seemed mythical, of the
same substance as his own fantastic thoughts. He rarely saw a newspaper,
and did not follow from day to day the systematic readings of the
thermometer, the reports of ice-fairs, of coaches driven across the river
at Hampton, of the skating on the fens; and hence the iron roads, the
beleaguered silence and the heavy folds of mist appeared as amazing as a
picture, significant, appalling. He could not look out and see a common
suburban street foggy and dull, nor think of the inhabitants as at work
or sitting cheerfully eating nuts about their fires; he saw a vision of a
grey road vanishing, of dim houses all empty and deserted, and the
silence seemed eternal. And when he went out and passed through street
after street, all void, by the vague shapes of houses that appeared for a
moment and were then instantly swallowed up, it seemed to him as if he
had strayed into a city that had suffered some inconceivable doom, that
he alone wandered where myriads had once dwelt. It was a town as great as
Babylon, terrible as Rome, marvelous as Lost Atlantis, set in the midst
of a white wilderness surrounded by waste places. It was impossible to
escape from it; if he skulked between hedges, and crept away beyond the
frozen pools, presently the serried stony lines confronted him like an
army, and far and far they swept away into the night, as some fabled wall
that guards an empire in the vast dim East. Or in that distorting medium
of the mist, changing all things, he imagined that he trod an infinite
desolate plain, abandoned from ages, but circled and encircled with
dolmen and menhir that loomed out at him, gigantic, terrible. All London
was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones
circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every
initiation eternal loss. Or perhaps he was astray for ever in a land of
grey rocks. He had seen the light of home, the flicker of the fire on the
walls; close at hand, it seemed, was the open door, and he had heard dear
voices calling to him across the gloom, but he had just missed the path.
The lamps vanished, the voices sounded thin and died away, and yet he
knew that those within were waiting, that they could not bear to close
the door, but waited, calling his name, while he had miss