as impossible to move.

He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at
the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old
station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road
to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all
else one vivid perspective of lights and heads. Against the sky on his
right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile. It
appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.

He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped
a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to
absorb them.

Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had
ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a
unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a
sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of
individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant
into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.
The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this
creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant
humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see
on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation--stretching, too,
as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast
city.

He did not even ask himself for what they waited. He knew, yet he did
not know. He knew it was for a revelation--for something that should
crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.

He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he
began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered
that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day--of humanity
gathered to meet Jesus Christ--Jesus Christ! Ah! how tiny that Figure
seemed to him now--how far away--real indeed, but insignificant to
himself--how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life! He glanced up
at the Campanile. Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was
there not?--a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died
twenty centuries ago.... Well, well. It was a long way off....

He did not quite understand what was happening to him. "Sweet Jesus, be
to me not a Judge but a Saviour," he whispered beneath his breath,
gripping the granite of the pillar; and a moment later k