some
recognition. He held up his arm, then pointed to the Council House and
dropped his hand. The voices below became unanimous, gathered volume,
came up to him as multitudinous wavelets of cheering.

The western sky was a pallid bluish green, and Jupiter shone high in the
south, before the capitulation was accomplished. Above was a slow
insensible change, the advance of night serene and beautiful; below was
hurry, excitement, conflicting orders, pauses, spasmodic developments of
organisation, a vast ascending clamour and confusion. Before the Council
came out, toiling perspiring men, directed by a conflict of shouts,
carried forth hundreds of those who had perished in the hand-to-hand
conflict within those long passages and chambers....

Guards in black lined the way that the Council would come, and as far as
the eye could reach into the hazy blue twilight of the ruins, and
swarming now at every possible point in the captured Council House and
along the shattered cliff of its circumadjacent buildings, were
innumerable people, and their voices, even when they were not cheering,
were as the soughing of the sea upon a pebble beach. Ostrog had chosen a
huge commanding pile of crushed and overthrown masonry, and on this a
stage of timbers and metal girders was being hastily constructed. Its
essential parts were complete, but humming and clangorous machinery still
glared fitfully in the shadows beneath this temporary edifice.

The stage had a small higher portion on which Graham stood with Ostrog
and Lincoln close beside him, a little in advance of a group of minor
officers. A broader lower stage surrounded this quarter-deck, and on this
were the black-uniformed guards of the revolt armed with the little green
weapons whose very names Graham still did not know. Those standing about
him perceived that his eyes wandered perpetually from the swarming people
in the twilight ruins about him to the darkling mass of the White Council
House, whence the Trustees would presently come, and to the gaunt cliffs
of ruin that encircled him, and so back to the people. The voices of the
crowd swelled to a deafening tumult.

He saw the Councillors first afar off in the glare of one of the
temporary lights that marked their path, a little group of white figures
in a black archway. In the Council House they had been in darkness. He
watched them approaching, drawing nearer past first this blazing
electric star and then that; the minatory roar