Ostrog's
culminating moves against the Council. Few had had any experience with
this weapon, many had never discharged one, many who carried it came
unprovided with ammunition; never was wilder firing in the history of
warfare. It was a battle of amateurs, a hideous experimental warfare,
armed rioters fighting armed rioters, armed rioters swept forward by
the words and fury of a song, by the tramping sympathy of their numbers,
pouring in countless myriads towards the smaller ways, the disabled
lifts, the galleries slippery with blood, the halls and passages choked
with smoke, beneath the flying stages, to learn there when retreat was
hopeless the ancient mysteries of warfare. And overhead save for a few
sharpshooters upon the roof spaces and for a few bands and threads of
vapour that multiplied and darkened towards the evening, the day was a
clear serenity. Ostrog it seems had no bombs at command and in all
the earlier phases of the battle the aeropiles played no part. Not the
smallest cloud was there to break the empty brilliance of the sky. It
seemed as though it held itself vacant until the aeroplanes should come.

Ever and again there was news of these, drawing nearer, from this
Mediterranean port and then that, and presently from the south of
France. But of the new guns that Ostrog had made and which were known to
be in the city came no news in spite of Graham's urgency, nor any report
of successes from the dense felt of fighting strands about the flying
stages. Section after section of the Labour Societies reported itself
assembled, reported itself marching, and vanished from knowledge into
the labyrinth of that warfare What was happening there? Even the busy
ward leaders did not know. In spite of the opening and closing of
doors, the hasty messengers, the ringing of bells and the perpetual
clitter-clack of recording implements, Graham felt isolated, strangely
inactive, inoperative.

Their isolation seemed at times the strangest, the most unexpected of
all the things that had happened since his awakening. It had something
of the quality of that inactivity that comes in dreams. A tumult, the
stupendous realisation of a world struggle between Ostrog and himself,
and then this confined quiet little room with its mouthpieces and bells
and broken mirror!

Now the door would be closed and they were alone together; they seemed
sharply marked off then from all the unprecedented world storm that
rushed together without