nd him tramped his guards. The
whole concave of the moving ways below was a congested mass of people
marching, tramping to the left, shouting, waving hands and arms, pouring
along a huge vista, shouting as they came into view, shouting as they
passed, shouting as they receded, until the globes of electric light
receding in perspective dropped down it seemed and hid the swarming bare
heads. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.

The song roared up to Graham now, no longer upborne by music, but coarse
and noisy, and the beating of the marching feet, tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp, interwove with a thunderous irregularity of footsteps from the
undisciplined rabble that poured along the higher ways.

Abruptly he noted a contrast. The buildings on the opposite side of the
way seemed deserted, the cables and bridges that laced across the aisle
were empty and shadowy. It came into Graham's mind that these also
should have swarmed with people.

He felt a curious emotion--throbbing--very fast! He stopped again. The
guards before him marched on; those about him stopped as he did. He saw
the direction of their faces. The throbbing had something to do with the
lights. He too looked up.

At first it seemed to him a thing that affected the lights simply, an
isolated phenomenon, having no bearing on the things below. Each huge
globe of blinding whiteness was as it were clutched, compressed in a
systole that was followed by a transitory diastole, and again a systole
like a tightening grip, darkness, light, darkness, in rapid alternation.

Graham became aware that this strange behaviour of the lights had to
do with the people below. The appearance of the houses and ways, the
appearance of the packed masses changed, became a confusion of vivid
lights and leaping shadows. He saw a multitude of shadows had sprung
into aggressive existence, seemed rushing up, broadening, widening,
growing with steady swiftness--to leap suddenly back and return
reinforced. The song and the tramping had ceased. The unanimous march,
he discovered, was arrested, there were eddies, a flow sideways, shouts
of "The lights!" Voices were crying together one thing. "The lights!"
cried these voices. "The lights!" He looked down. In this dancing death
of the lights the area of the street had suddenly become a monstrous
struggle. The huge white globes became purple-white, purple with a
reddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered between
light and extinction,