ed him. He was pleased at his wonderful
popularity, he bowed, and, seeking a gesture of longer range, waved his
arm. He was astonished at the violence of uproar that this provoked. The
tumult about the descending stairway rose to furious violence. He
became aware of crowded balconies, of men sliding along ropes, of men
in trapeze-like seats hurling athwart the space. He heard voices behind
him, a number of people descending the steps through the archway; he
suddenly perceived that his guardian Howard was back again and gripping
his arm painfully, and shouting inaudibly in his ear.

He turned, and Howard's face was white. "Come back," he heard. "They
will stop the ways. The whole city will be in confusion."

He perceived a number of men hurrying along the passage of blue pillars
behind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen beard, a tall
man in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red carrying staves, and
all these people had anxious eager faces.

"Get him away," cried Howard.

"But why?" said Graham. "I don't see--"

"You must come away!" said the man in red in a resolute voice. His face
and eyes were resolute, too. Graham's glances went from face to face,
and he was suddenly aware of that most disagreeable flavour in life,
compulsion. Some one gripped his arm.... He was being dragged away. It
seemed as though the tumult suddenly became two, as if half the shouts
that had come in from this wonderful roadway had sprung into the
passages of the great building behind him. Marvelling and confused,
feeling an impotent desire to resist, Graham was half led, half thrust,
along the passage of blue pillars, and suddenly he found himself alone
with Howard in a lift and moving swiftly upward.

CHAPTER VI. THE HALL OF THE ATLAS

From the moment when the tailor had bowed his farewell to the moment
when Graham found himself in the lift, was altogether barely five
minutes. And as yet the haze of his vast interval of sleep hung about
him, as yet the initial strangeness of his being alive at all in
this remote age touched everything with wonder, with a sense of the
irrational, with something of the quality of a realistic dream. He was
still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in
life. What he had seen, and especially the last crowded tumult, framed
in the setting of the balcony, had a spectacular turn, like a thing
witnessed from the box of a theatre. "I don't understand," he said.
"What