was presently able and willing to accompany Ostrog through several miles
(as it seemed) of passages, lifts, and slides to the closing scene of the
White Council's rule.

The way ran deviously through a maze of buildings. They came at last to a
passage that curved about, and showed broadening before him an oblong
opening, clouds hot with sunset, and the ragged skyline of the ruinous
Council House. A tumult of shouts came drifting up to him. In another
moment they had come out high up on the brow of the cliff of torn
buildings that overhung the wreckage. The vast area opened to Graham's
eyes, none the less strange and wonderful for the remote view he had had
of it in the oval mirror.

This rudely amphitheatral space seemed now the better part of a mile to
its outer edge. It was gold lit on the left hand, catching the sunlight,
and below and to the right clear and cold in the shadow. Above the
shadowy grey Council House that stood in the midst of it, the great black
banner of the surrender still hung in sluggish folds against the blazing
sunset. Severed rooms, halls and passages gaped strangely, broken masses
of metal projected dismally from the complex wreckage, vast masses of
twisted cable dropped like tangled seaweed, and from its base came a
tumult of innumerable voices, violent concussions, and the sound of
trumpets. All about this great white pile was a ring of desolation; the
smashed and blackened masses, the gaunt foundations and ruinous lumber of
the fabric that had been destroyed by the Council's orders, skeletons of
girders, Titanic masses of wall, forests of stout pillars. Amongst the
sombre wreckage beneath, running water flashed and glistened, and far
away across the space, out of the midst of a vague vast mass of
buildings, there thrust the twisted end of a water-main, two hundred feet
in the air, thunderously spouting a shining cascade. And everywhere great