black favours, black banners, black festoons across the streets. And out
here, under the fresh sunlight, beyond the crater of the fight, as if
nothing had happened to the earth, the forest of wind vanes that had
grown from one or two while the Council had ruled, roared peacefully upon
their incessant duty.

Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the Surrey Hills
rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contours of
Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over the
countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had
interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farm houses had nestled
among their trees, wind-wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like
them vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age,
cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed
away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. And underneath
these wandered the countless flocks and herds of the British Food Trust,
his property, with their lonely guards and keepers.

Not a familiar outline anywhere broke the cluster of gigantic shapes
below. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings in
Westminster, embedded out of sight, arched over and covered in among the
giant growths of this great age. The Thames, too, made no fall and gleam
of silver to break the wilderness of the city; the thirsty water mains
drank up every drop of its waters before they reached the walls. Its bed
and estuary, scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea water, and a race
of grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of trade from the Pool
thereby beneath the very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in the
eastward between earth and sky hung the clustering masts of the colossal
shipping in the Pool. For all the heavy traffic, for which there was no
need of haste, came in gigantic sailing ships from the ends of the earth,