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.