have
they blown up?" asked the man breathlessly. "That was an explosion," and
before Graham could speak he had hurried on.

The great buildings rose dimly, veiled by a perplexing twilight, albeit
the rivulet of sky above was now bright with day. He noted many strange
features, understanding none at the time; he even spelt out many of the
inscriptions in Phonetic lettering. But what profits it to decipher a
confusion of odd-looking letters resolving itself, after painful strain
of eye and mind, into "Here is Eadhamite," or, "Labour Bureau--Little
Side?" Grotesque thought, that in all probability some or all of these
cliff-like houses were his!

The perversity of his experience came to him vividly. In actual fact he
had made such a leap in time as romancers have imagined again and again.
And that fact realised, he had been prepared, his mind had, as it were,
seated itself for a spectacle. And no spectacle, but a great vague
danger, unsympathetic shadows and veils of darkness. Somewhere through
the labyrinthine obscurity his death sought him. Would he, after all, be
killed before he saw? It might be that even at the next shadowy corner
his destruction ambushed. A great desire to see, a great longing to
know, arose in him.

He became fearful of corners. It seemed to him that there was safety
in concealment. Where could he hide to be inconspicuous when the lights
returned? At last he sat down upon a seat in a recess on one of the
higher ways, conceiving he was alone there.

He squeezed his knuckles into his weary eyes. Suppose when he looked
again he found the dark through of parallel ways and that intolerable
altitude of edifice, gone? Suppose he were to discover the whole story
of these last few days, the awakening, the shouting multitudes, the
darkness and the fighting, a phantasmagoria, a new and more vivid sort
of dream. It must be a dream; it was so inconsecutive, so reasonless.
Why were the people fighting for him? Why should this saner world regard
him as Owner and Master?

So he thought, sitting blinded, and then he looked again, half hoping
in spite of his ears to see some familiar aspect of the life of the
nineteenth century, to see, perhaps, the little harbour of Boscastle
about him, the cliffs of Pentargen, or the bedroom of his home. But fact
takes no heed of human hopes. A squad of men with a black banner tramped
athwart the nearer shadows, intent on conflict, and beyond rose that
giddy wall of frontage