CHAPTER V
THE MOVING WAYS
He went to the railings of the balcony and stared upward. An exclamationof surprise at his appearance, and the movements of a number of peoplecame from the great area below.
His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place intowhich he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously ineither direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across thehuge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut outthe sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeamsthat filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there agossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across thechasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edificehung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the oppositefacade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circularperforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vastwindows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief. Athwart theseran inscriptions horizontally and obliquely in an unfamiliar lettering.Here and there close to the roof cables of a peculiar stoutness werefastened, and drooped in a steep curve to circular openings on theopposite side of the space, and even as Graham noted these a remote andtiny figure of a man clad in pale blue arrested his attention. Thislittle figure was far overhead across the space beside the higherfastening of one of these festoons, hanging forward from a little ledgeof masonry and handling some well-nigh invisible strings dependent fromthe line. Then suddenly, with a swoop that sent Graham's heart into hismouth, this man had rushed down the curve and vanished through a roundopening on the hither side of the way. Graham had been looking up as hecame out upon the balcony, and the things he saw above and opposed tohim 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, asGraham understood such things, for in the nineteenth century the onlyroads and streets were beaten tracks of motionless earth, jostlingrivulets of vehicles between narrow footways. But this roadway was threehundred feet across, and it moved; it moved, all save the middle, thelowest part. For a moment, the motion dazzled his mind. Then heunderstood. Under the balcony this extraordinary roadway ran swiftly toGraham's right, an endless flow rushing along as fast as a nineteenthcentury express train, an endless platform of narrow transverseoverlapping slats with little interspaces that permitted it to followthe curvatures of the street. Upon it were seats, and here and therelittle kiosks, but they swept by too swiftly for him to see what mightbe therein. From this nearest and swiftest platform a series of othersdescended to the centre of the space. Each moved to the right, eachperceptibly slower than the one above it, but the difference in pace wassmall enough to permit anyone to step from any platform to the oneadjacent, and so walk uninterruptedly from the swiftest to themotionless middle way. Beyond this middle way was another series ofendless platforms rushing with varying pace to Graham's left. And seatedin crowds upon the two widest and swiftest platforms, or stepping fromone to another down the steps, or swarming over the central space, wasan innumerable and wonderfully diversified multitude of people.
"You must not stop here," shouted Howard suddenly at his side. "You mustcome away at once."
Graham made no answer. He heard without hearing. The platforms ran with aroar and the people were shouting. He perceived women and girls withflowing hair, beautifully robed, with bands crossing between the breasts.These first came out of the confusion. Then he perceived that thedominant note in that kaleidoscope of costume was the pale blue that thetailor's boy had worn. He became aware of cries of "The Sleeper. What hashappened to the Sleeper?" and it seemed as though the rushing platformsbefore him were suddenly spattered with the pale buff of human faces, andthen still more thickly. He saw pointing fingers. He perceived that themotionless central area of this huge arcade just opposite to the balconywas densely crowded with blue-clad people. Some sort of struggle hadsprung into life. People seemed to be pushed up the running platforms oneither side, and carried away against their will. They would spring offso soon as they were beyond the thick of the confusion, and run backtowards the conflict.
"It is the Sleeper. Verily it is the Sleeper," shouted voices. "That isnever the Sleeper," shouted others. More and more faces were turned tohim. At the intervals along this central area Graham noted openings,pits, apparently the heads of staircases going down with peopleascending out of them and descending into them. The struggle it seemedcentred about the one of these nearest to him. People were running downthe moving platforms to this, leaping dexterously from platform toplatform. The clustering people on the higher platforms seemed to dividetheir interest between this point and the balcony. A number of sturdylittle figures clad in a uniform of bright red, and working methodicallytogether, were employed it seemed in preventing access to this descendingstaircase. About them a crowd was rapidly accumulating. Their brilliantcolour contrasted vividly with the whitish-blue of their antagonists, forthe 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 thatthe people on the nearer platform were standing up. The nearer platformhe perceived was empty to the right of him, and far across the space theplatform running in the opposite direction was coming crowded and passingaway bare. With incredible swiftness a vast crowd had gathered in thecentral space before his eyes; a dense swaying mass of people, and theshouts grew from a fitful crying to a voluminous incessant clamour: "TheSleeper! The Sleeper!" and yells and cheers, a waving of garments andcries of "Stop the Ways!" They were also crying another name strange toGraham. It sounded like "Ostrog." The slower platforms were soon thickwith active people, running against the movement so as to keep themselvesopposite to him.
"Stop the Ways," they cried. Agile figures ran up from the centre to theswift road nearest to him, were borne rapidly past him, shouting strange,unintelligible things, and ran back obliquely to the central way. Onething he distinguished: "It is indeed the Sleeper. It is indeed theSleeper," they testified.
For a space Graham stood motionless. Then he became vividly aware thatall this concerned him. He was pleased at his wonderful popularity, hebowed, and, seeking a gesture of longer range, waved his arm. He wasastonished at the violence of uproar that this provoked. The tumult aboutthe descending stairway rose to furious violence. He became aware ofcrowded balconies, of men sliding along ropes, of men in trapeze-likeseats hurling athwart the space. He heard voices behind him, a number ofpeople descending the steps through the archway; he suddenly perceivedthat 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 willstop the ways. The whole city will be in confusion."
He perceived a number of men hurrying along the passage of blue pillarsbehind Howard, the red-haired man, the man with the flaxen beard, a tallman in vivid vermilion, a crowd of others in red carrying staves, and allthese 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 faceand eyes were resolute, too. Graham's glances went from face to face, andhe was suddenly aware of that most disagreeable flavour in life,compulsion. Someone gripped his arm....
He was being dragged away. It seemed as though the tumult suddenlybecame two, as if half the shouts that had come in from this wonderfulroadway had sprung into the passages of the great building behind him.Marvelling and confused, feeling an impotent desire to resist, Graham washalf led, half thrust, along the passage of blue pillars, and suddenly hefound himself alone with Howard in a lift and moving swiftly upward.