a sort of rude discipline to keep the crowd
off him, to make a space clear about him. He passed out of the hall, and
saw a crude, new wall rising blankly before him topped by blue sky. He
was swung down to his feet; someone gripped his arm and guided him. He
found the man in yellow close at hand. They were taking him up a narrow
stairway of brick, and close at hand rose the great red painted masses,
the cranes and levers and the still engines of the big building machine.

He was at the top of the steps. He was hurried across a narrow railed
footway, and suddenly with a vast shouting the amphitheatre of ruins
opened again before him. "The Master is with us! The Master! The Master!"
The shout swept athwart the lake of faces like a wave, broke against the
distant cliff of ruins, and came back in a welter of cries. "The Master
is on our side!"

Graham perceived that he was no longer encompassed by people, that he was
standing upon a little temporary platform of white metal, part of a
flimsy seeming scaffolding that laced about the great mass of the Council
House. Over all the huge expanse of the ruins swayed and eddied the
shouting people; and here and there the black banners of the
revolutionary societies ducked and swayed and formed rare nuclei of
organisation in the chaos. Up the steep stairs of wall and scaffolding by
which his rescuers had reached the opening in the Atlas Chamber clung a
solid crowd, and little energetic black figures clinging to pillars and
projections were strenuous to induce these congested, masses to stir.
Behind him, at a higher point on the scaffolding, a number of men
struggled upwards with the flapping folds of a huge black standard.
Through the yawning gap in the walls below him he could look down upon
the packed attentive multitudes in the Hall of the Atlas. The distant
flying stages to the south came out bright and vivid, brought nearer as
it seemed by an unusual translucency of the air. A solitary monoplane
beat up from the central stage as if to meet the coming aeroplanes.

"What has become of Ostrog?" asked Graham, and even as he spoke he saw
that all eyes were turned from him towards the crest of the Council House
building. He looked also in this direction of universal attention. For a
moment he saw nothing but the jagged corner of a wall, hard and clear
against the sky. Then in the shadow he perceived the interior of a room
and recognised with a start the green and white decorations of