him, growing, as it seemed, louder, denser, more furious each moment.
Fragments of recognisable sounds drove towards him, were whirled away
from him as his mind reached out to grasp them. Voices seemed to be
shouting conflicting orders, other voices answered. There were suddenly a
succession of piercing screams close beneath them.

A voice bawled in his ear, "The red police," and receded forthwith beyond
his questions.

A crackling sound grew to distinctness, and therewith a leaping of faint
flashes along the edge of the further ways. By their light Graham saw the
heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons like those of his
guards, leap into an instant's dim visibility. The whole area began to
crackle, to flash with little instantaneous streaks of light, and
abruptly the darkness rolled back like a curtain.

A glare of light dazzled his eyes, a vast seething expanse of struggling
men confused his mind. A shout, a burst of cheering, came across the
ways. He looked up to see the source of the light. A man hung far
overhead from the upper part of a cable, holding by a rope the blinding
star that had driven the darkness back.

Graham's eyes fell to the ways again. A wedge of red a little way
along the vista caught his eye. He saw it was a dense mass of red-clad
men jammed on the higher further way, their backs against the pitiless
cliff of building, and surrounded by a dense crowd of antagonists.
They were fighting. Weapons flashed and rose and fell, heads vanished
at the edge of the contest, and other heads replaced them, the little
flashes from the green weapons became little jets of smoky grey while
the light lasted.

Abruptly the flare was extinguished and the ways were an inky darkness
once more, a tumultuous mystery.

He felt something thrusting against him. He was being pushed along the
gallery. Someone was shouting--it might be at him. He was too confused
to hear. He was thrust against the wall, and a number of people
blundered past him. It seemed to him that his guards were struggling
with one another.

Suddenly the cable-hung star-holder appeared again, and the whole scene
was white and dazzling. The band of red-coats seemed broader and nearer;
its apex was half-way down the ways towards the central aisle. And
raising his eyes Graham saw that a number of these men had also appeared
now in the darkened lower galleries of the opposite building, and were
firing over the heads of their fellows be