e facade.

That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge
of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of
the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it but
a waste of ruins here, variegated and dense with thickets of the
heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt,
interspersed among levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant
stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges
of houses. But for the most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the
wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer
islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned
indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial, it seemed',
to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms
of the time.

The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the countless
cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of the city
wall in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and tall grasses.
Here and there gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst the puny remains
of Victorian times, and cable ways slanted to them from the city. That
winter day they seemed deserted. Deserted, too, were the artificial
gardens among the ruins. The city limits were indeed as sharply defined
as in the ancient days when the gates were shut at nightfall and the
robber foreman prowled to the very walls. A huge semi-circular throat
poured out a vigorous traffic upon the Eadhamite Bath Road. So the first
prospect of the world beyond the city flashed on Graham, and dwindled.
And when at last he could look vertically downward again, he saw below
him the vegetable fields of the Thames valley--innumerable minute
oblongs of ruddy brown, intersected by shining threads, the sewage
ditches.

His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication. He
found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring
to shout. After a time that desire became too strong for him, and he
shouted.

The machine had now risen as high as was customary with aeropiles, and
they began to curve about towards the south. Steering, Graham perceived,
was effected by the opening or closing of one or two thin strips of
membrane in one or other of the otherwise rigid wings, and by the
movement of the whole engine backward or forward along its supports. The
aeronaut set the engine gliding sl