The complete works, p.82
The Complete Works, page 82
the three men had been standing.
CHAPTER V
THE MOVING WAYS
He went to the railings of the balcony and stared
upward. An exclamation of surprise at his appearance, and the movements of a number of people came
from the spacious area below.
His first impression was of overwhelming architecture.
The place into which he looked was an aisle of
Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction.
Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together
across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic
globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams
that filtered down through the girders and wires.
Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted
with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the
air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward,
and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken
by great archings, circular perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief.
Athwart these ran inscriptions horizontally and
obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering. Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness were fastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular
openings on the opposite side of the space, and even as Graham noted these a remote and tiny figure of a
man clad in pale blue arrested his attention. This little figure was far overhead across the space beside the
higher fastening of one of these festoons, hanging
forward from a little ledge of masonry and handling some well-nigh invisible strings dependent from the line.
Then suddenly, with a swoop that sent Graham's heart into his mouth, this man had rushed down the curve
and vanished through a round opening on the hither
side of the way. Graham had been looking up as he
came out upon the balcony, and the things he saw
above and opposed to him had at first seized his
attention to the exclusion of anything else. Then suddenly he discovered the roadway! It was not a roadway at
all, as Graham understood such things, for in the
nineteenth century the only roads and streets were
beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostling rivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway
was three hundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle, the lowest part. For a moment,
the motion dazzled his mind. Then he understood.
Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran
swiftly to Graham's right, an endless flow rushing
along as fast as a nineteenth century express train, an endless platform of narrow transverse overlapping
slats with little interspaces that permitted it to follow the curvatures of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and there little kiosks, but they swept by too
swiftly for him to see what might be therein. From
this nearest and swiftest platform a series of others descended to the centre of the space. Each moved to
the right, each perceptibly slower than the one above it, but the difference in pace was small enough to permit anyone to step from any platform to the one adjacent, and so walk uninterruptedly from the swiftest to
the motionless middle way. Beyond this middle way
was another series of endless platforms rushing with varying pace to Graham's left. And seated in crowds
upon the two widest and swiftest platforms, or stepping from one to another down the steps, or swarming
over the central space, was an innumerable and
wonderfully diversified multitude of people.
"You must not stop here," shouted Howard suddenly at his side. "You must come away at once."
Graham made no answer. He heard without hearing.
The platforms ran with a roar and the people
were shouting. He perceived women and girls with
flowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the breasts. These first came out of the
confusion. Then he perceived that the dominant note
in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that the tailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries
of "The Sleeper. What has happened to the Sleeper?"
and it seemed as though the rushing platforms before him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of
human faces, and then still more thickly. He saw
pointing fingers. He perceived that the motionless
central area of this huge arcade just opposite to the balcony was densely crowded with blue-clad people.
Some sort of struggle had sprung into life. People
seemed to be pushed up the running platforms on either side, and carried away against their will. They would spring off so soon as they were beyond the thick of
the confusion, and run back towards the conflict.
"It is the Sleeper. Verily it is the Sleeper," shouted voices. "That is never the Sleeper," shouted others. More and more faces were turned to him. At
the intervals along this central area Graham noted
openings, pits, apparently the heads of staircases going down with people ascending out of them and
descending into them. The struggle it seemed centred about the one of these nearest to him. People were
running down the moving platforms to this, leaping
dexterously from platform to platform. The clustering people on the higher platforms seemed to divide
their interest between this point and the balcony. A number of sturdy little figures clad in a uniform of bright red, and working methodically together, were
employed it seemed in preventing access to this
descending staircase. About them a crowd was rapidly accumulating. Their brilliant colour contrasted vividly with the whitish-blue of their antagonists, for the
struggle was indisputable.
He saw these things with Howard shouting in his
ear and shaking his arm. And then suddenly Howard
was gone and he stood alone.
He perceived that the cries of "The Sleeper" grew in volume, and that the people on the nearer platform were standing up. The nearer swifter platform he
perceived was empty to the right of him, and far
across the space the platform running in the opposite direction was coming crowded and passing away bare.
With incredible swiftness a vast crowd had gathered
in the central space before his eyes; a dense swaying mass of people, and the shouts grew from a fitful crying to a voluminous incessant clamour: "The Sleeper!"
The Sleeper!" and yells and cheers, a waving of garments and cries of "Stop the ways!" They were also crying another name strange to Graham. It sounded
like "Ostrog." The slower platforms were soon thick with active people, running against the movement so
as to keep themselves opposite to him.
"Stop the ways," they cried. Agile figures ran up swiftly from the centre to the swift road nearest to him, were borne rapidly past him, shouting strange,
unintelligible things, and ran back obliquely to the central way. One thing he distinguished: "It is indeed the Sleeper. It is indeed the Sleeper," they testified.
For a space Graham stood without a movement.
Then he became vividly aware that all this concerned 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 was the trouble? My mind is in a whirl. Why were
they shouting? What is the danger?"
"We have our troubles," said Howard. His eyes avoided Graham's enquiry. "This is a time of unrest.
And, in fact, your appearance, your waking just now, has a sort of connexion--"
He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his
breathing. He stopped abruptly.
"I don't understand," said Graham.
"It will be clearer later," said Howard.
He glanced uneasily upward, as though he found the
progress of the lift slow.
"I shall understand better, no doubt, when I have seen my way about a little," said Graham puzzled. "It.
will be--it is bound to be perplexing. At present it is all so strange. Anything seems possible. Anything
In the details even. Your counting, I understand, is different."
The lift stopped, and they stepped out into a narrow but very long passage between high walls, along
which ran an extraordinary number of tubes and big
cables.
"What a huge place this is!" said Graham. "Is it all one building? What place is it?"
"This is one of the city ways for various public services. Light and so forth."
"Was it a social trouble--that--in the great
roadway place? How are you governed? Have you
still a police?"
"Several," said Howard.
"Several? "
"About fourteen."
"I don't understand."
"Very probably not. Our social order will probably seem very complex to you. To tell you the truth, I
don't understand it myself very clearly. Nobody does.
You will, perhaps--bye and bye. We have to go to
the Council."
Graham's attention was divided between the urgent
necessity of his inquiries and the people in the
passages and halls they were traversing. For a moment his mind would be concentrated upon Howard and
the halting answers he made, and then he would lose
the thread in response to some vivid unexpected
impression. Along the passages, in the halls, half the people seemed to be men in the red uniform. The pale blue canvas that had been so abundant in the aisle of moving ways did not appear. Invariably these men
looked at him, and saluted him and Howard as they
passed.
He had a clear vision of entering a long corridor,
and there were a number of girls sitting on low seats and as though in a class. He saw no teacher, but only a novel apparatus from which he fancied a voice proceeded.
The girls regarded him and his conductor, he
thought, with curiosity and astonishment. But he was hurried on before he could form a clear idea of the
gathering. He judged they knew Howard and not
himself, and that they wondered who he was. This
Howard, it seemed, was a person of importance. But
then he was also merely Graham's guardian. That
was odd.
There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung so that he could see the feet and
ankles of people going to and fro thereon, but no
more of them. Then vague impressions of galleries
and of casual astonished passers-by turning round to stare after the two of them with their red-clad guard.
The stimulus of the restoratives he had taken was
only temporary. He was speedily fatigued by this
excessive haste. He asked Howard to slacken his
speed. Presently he was in a lift that had a window
upon the great street space, but this was glazed and did not open, and they were too high for him to see
the moving platforms below. But he saw people going
to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking ridges.
And thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it. They crossed by means of a narrow
bridge closed in with glass, so clear that it made him giddy even to remember it. The floor of it also was
of glass. From his memory of the cliffs between New
Quay and Boscastle, so remote in time, and so recent in his experience, it seemed to him that they must be near four hundred feet above the moving ways. He
stopped, looked down between his legs upon the
swarming blue and red multitudes, minute and fore-
shortened, struggling and gesticulating still towards the little balcony far below, a little toy balcony, it seemed, where he had so recently been standing. A
thin haze and the glare of the mighty globes of light obscured everything. A man seated in a little openwork cradle shot by from some point still higher than the little narrow bridge, rushing down a cable as
swiftly almost as if he were falling. Graham stopped involuntarily to watch this strange passenger vanish in a great circular opening below, and then his eyes went back to the tumultuous struggle.
Along one of the swifter ways rushed a thick crowd
of red spots. This broke up into individuals as it
approached the balcony, and went pouring down the
slower ways towards the dense struggling crowd on
the central area. These men in red appeared to be
armed with sticks or truncheons; they seemed to be
striking and thrusting. A great shouting, cries of
wrath, screaming, burst out and came up to Graham,
faint and thin. "Go on," cried Howard, laying hands on him.
Another man rushed down a cable. Graham suddenly
glanced up to see whence he came, and beheld
through the glassy roof and the network of cables and girders, dim rhythmically passing forms like the vans of windmills, and between them glimpses of a remote
and pallid sky. Then Howard had thrust him forward
across the bridge, and he was in a little narrow passage decorated with geometrical patterns.
"I want to see more of that," cried Graham, resisting.
"No, no," cried Howard, still gripping his arm.
"This way. You must go this way." And the men in red following them seemed ready to enforce his orders.
Some negroes in a curious wasp-like uniform of black and yellow appeared down the passage, and one hastened to throw up a sliding shutter that had seemed
a door to Graham, and led the way through it.
Graham found himself in a gallery overhanging the
end of a great chamber. The attendant in black and
yellow crossed this, thrust up a second shutter and
stood waiting.
This place had the appearance of an ante-room. He
saw a number of people in the central space, and at
the opposite end a large and imposing doorway at the top of a flight of steps, heavily curtained but giving a glimpse of some still larger hall beyond. He perceived white men in red and other negroes in black and yellow standing stiffly about those portals.
As they crossed the gallery he heard a whisper from
below, "The Sleeper," and was aware of a turning of heads, a hum of observation. They entered another
little passage in the wall of this ante-chamber, and then he found himself on an iron-railed gallery of
