The crowd converged on an archway, passed through a short throat and
emerged on a wider space again, lit dimly. The black figures about him
spread out and ran up what seemed in the twilight to be a gigantic series
of steps. He followed. The people dispersed to the right and left.... He
perceived that he was no longer in a crowd. He stopped near the highest
step. Before him, on that level, were groups of seats and a little kiosk.
He went up to this and, stopping in the shadow of its eaves, looked about
him panting.

Everything was vague and grey, but he recognised that these great steps
were a series of platforms of the "ways," now motionless again. The
platform slanted up on either side, and the tall buildings rose beyond,
vast dim ghosts, their inscriptions and advertisements indistinctly seen,
and up through the girders and cables was a faint interrupted ribbon of
pallid sky. A number of people hurried by. From their shouts and voices,
it seemed they were hurrying to join the fighting. Other less noisy
figures flitted timidly among the shadows.

From very far away down the street he could hear the sound of a struggle.
But it was evident to him that this was not the street into which the
theatre opened. That former fight, it seemed, had suddenly dropped out of
sound and hearing. And they were fighting for him!

For a space he was like a man who pauses in the reading of a vivid book,
and suddenly doubts what he has been taking unquestionably. At that time
he had little mind for details; the whole effect was a huge astonishment.
Oddly enough, while the flight from the Council prison, the great crowd
in the hall, and the attack of the red police upon the swarming people
were clearly present in his mind, it cost him an effort to piece in his
awakening and to revive the meditative interval of the Silent Rooms. At