disc had taken depth and colour, had
assumed the appearance of an oval window looking out upon a strange
unfamiliar scene.

At the first glance he was unable to guess what this scene might be.
It was a daylight scene, the daylight of a wintry day, grey and clear.
Across the picture and halfway as it seemed between him and the remoter
view, a stout cable of twisted white wire stretched vertically. Then he
perceived that the rows of great windwheels he saw, the wide intervals,
the occasional gulfs of darkness, were akin to those through which he
had fled from the Council House. He distinguished an orderly file of red
figures marching across an open space between files of men in black,
and realised before Ostrog spoke that he was looking down on the upper
surface of latter-day London. The overnight snows had gone. He judged
that this mirror was some modern replacement of the camera obscura, but
that matter was not explained to him. He saw that though the file of red
figures was trotting from left to right, yet they were passing out of
the picture to the left. He wondered momentarily, and then saw that the
picture was passing slowly, panorama fashion, across the oval.

"In a moment you will see the fighting," said Ostrog at his elbow.
"Those fellows in red you notice are prisoners. This is the roof space
of London--all the houses are practically continuous now. The streets
and public squares are covered in. The gaps and chasms of your time have
disappeared."

Something out of focus obliterated half the picture. Its form suggested
a man. There was a gleam of metal, a flash, something that swept across
the oval, as the eyelid of a bird sweeps across its eye, and the picture
was clear again. And now Graham beheld men running down among the
wind-wheels, pointing weapons from which jetted out little
smoky flashes. They swarmed thicker and thicker to the right,
gesticulating--it might be they were shouting, but of that the picture
told nothing. They and the windwheels passed slowly and steadily across
the field of the mirror.

"Now," said Ostrog, "comes the Council House," and slowly a black edge
crept into view and gathered Graham's attention. Soon it was no longer
an edge but a cavity, a huge blackened space amidst the clustering
edifices, and from it thin spires of smoke rose into the pallid winter
sky. Gaunt ruinous masses of the building, mighty truncated piers and
girders, rose dismally out of this cavernous darkness.