nfusion."

He perceived a number of men hurrying along the passage of blue pillars
behind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen beard, a tall
man in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red carrying staves, and all
these people had anxious eager faces.

"Get him away," cried Howard.

"But why?" said Graham. "I don't see--"

"You must come away!" said the man in red in a resolute voice. His face
and eyes were resolute, too. Graham's glances went from face to face, and
he was suddenly aware of that most disagreeable flavour in life,
compulsion. Someone gripped his arm....

He was being dragged away. It seemed as though the tumult suddenly
became two, as if half the shouts that had come in from this wonderful
roadway had sprung into the passages of the great building behind him.
Marvelling and confused, feeling an impotent desire to resist, Graham was
half led, half thrust, along the passage of blue pillars, and suddenly he
found himself alone with Howard in a lift and moving swiftly upward.

CHAPTER VI

THE HALL OF THE ATLAS

From the moment when the tailor had bowed his farewell to the moment when
Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five minutes. As
yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about him, as yet the
initial strangeness of his being alive at all in this remote age touched
everything with wonder, with a sense of the irrational, with something of
the quality of a realistic dream. He was still detached, an astonished
spectator, still but half involved in life. What he had seen, and
especially the last crowded tumult, framed in the setting of the balcony,
had a spectacular turn, like a thing witnessed from the box of a theatre.
"I don't understand," he said. "What was the trouble? My mind is in a
whirl. Why were they shouting? What is the danger?"

"We have our troubles," said Howard. His eyes avoided Graham's enquiry.
"This is a time of unrest. And, in fact, your appearance, your waking
just now, has a sort of connexion--"

He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing. He
stopped abruptly.

"I don't understand," said Graham.

"It will be clearer later," said Howard.

He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the progress of the
lift slow.

"I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about a
little," said Graham puzzled. "It will be--it is bound to be perplexing.
At present it is all so strange. Anything seem