the further side, where
now shapeless piles of smashed and shattered masonry were heaped
together.

It was already high day and the sun was shining brightly. Out of their
tall caverns of blue electric light came the swift ways crowded with
multitudes of people, who poured off them and gathered ever denser
over the wreckage and confusion of the ruins. The air was full of
their shouting, and they were pressing and swaying towards the central
building. For the most part that shouting mass consisted of shapeless
swarms, but here and there Graham could see that a rude discipline
struggled to establish itself. And every voice clamoured for order in
the chaos. "To your Wards! Every man to his Ward!"

The cable carried them into a hall which Graham recognised as the
ante-chamber to the Hall of the Atlas, about the gallery of which he had
walked days ago with Howard to show himself to the vanished Council, an
hour from his awakening. Now the place was empty except for two cable
attendants. These men seemed hugely astonished to recognise the Sleeper
in the man who swung down from the cross seat.

"Where is Helen Wotton?" he demanded. "Where is Helen Wotton?"

They did not know.

"Then where is Ostrog? I must see Ostrog forthwith. He has disobeyed me.
I have come back to take things out of his hands." Without waiting for
Asano, he went straight across the place, ascended the steps at the
further end, and, pulling the curtain aside, found himself facing the
perpetually labouring Titan.

The hall was empty. Its appearance had changed very greatly since
his first sight of it. It had suffered serious injury in the violent
struggle of the first outbreak. On the right hand side of the great
figure the upper half of the wall had been torn away for nearly two
hundred feet of its length, and a sheet of the same glassy film that
had enclosed Graham at his awakening had been drawn across the gap. This
deadened, but did not altogether exclude the roar of the people outside.
"Wards! Wards! Wards!" they seemed to be saying. Through it there were
visible the beams and supports of metal scaffoldings that rose and
fell according to the requirements of a great crowd of workmen. An idle
building machine, with lank arms of red painted metal that caught
the still plastic blocks of mineral paste and swung them neatly into
position, stretched gauntly across this green tinted picture. On it were
still a number of workmen staring at the crowd belo