ession was of overwhelming architecture. The place into
which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in
either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the
huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out
the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams
that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a
gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the
chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice
hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite
facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular
perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast
windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. Athwart these
ran inscriptions horizontally and obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering.
Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness were
fastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular openings on the
opposite side of the space, and even as Graham noted these a remote and
tiny figure of a man clad in pale blue arrested his attention. This
little figure was far overhead across the space beside the higher
fastening of one of these festoons, hanging forward from a little ledge
of masonry and handling some well-nigh invisible strings dependent from
the line. Then suddenly, with a swoop that sent Graham's heart into his
mouth, this man had rushed down the curve and vanished through a round
opening on the hither side of the way. Graham had been looking up as he
came out upon the balcony, and the things he saw above and opposed to
him had at first seized his attention to the exclusion of anything else.
Then suddenly he discovered the roadway! It was not a roadway at all, as
Graham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the only
roads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling
rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was three
hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle, the
lowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his mind. Then he
understood. Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly to
Graham's right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenth
century express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse
overlapping slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow
the curvatures of the street