For the most part the glass was bedewed, and Graham saw only hazy suggestions of the forms below, but near the pitch of the transparent roof the glass was clear, and he found himself looking sheerly down upon it all.  For awhile, in spite of the urgency of his guide, he gave way to vertigo and lay spread-eagled on the glass, sick and paralysed.  Far below, mere stirring specks and dots, went the people of the unsleeping city in their perpetual daylight, and the moving platforms ran on their incessant journey.  Messengers and men on unknown businesses shot along the drooping cables and the frail bridges were crowded with men.  It was like peering into a gigantic glass hive, and it lay vertically below him with only a tough glass of unknown thickness to save him from a fall.  The street showed warm and lit, and Graham was wet now to the skin with thawing snow, and his feet were numbed with cold.  For a space he could not move.  “Come on!” cried his guide, with terror in his voice.  “Come on!”

Graham reached the pitch of the roof by an effort.

Over the ridge, following his guide’s example, he turned about and slid backward down the opposite slope very swiftly, amid a little avalanche of snow.  While he was sliding he thought of what would happen if some broken gap should come in his way.  At the edge he stumbled to his feet ankle deep in slush, thanking heaven for an opaque footing again.  His guide was already clambering up a metal screen to a level expanse.

Through the spare snowflakes above this loomed another line of vast windmills, and then suddenly the amorphous tumult of the rotating wheels was pierced with a deafening sound.  It was a mechanical shrilling of extraordinary intensity that seemed to come simultaneously from every point of the compass.

“They have missed us already!” cried Graham’s guide in an accent of terror, and suddenly, with a blinding flash, the night became day.

Above the driving snow, from the summits of the wind-wheels, appeared vast masts carrying globes of livid light.  They receded in illimitable vistas in every direction.  As far as his eye could penetrate the snowfall they glared.

“Get on this,” cried Graham’s conductor, and thrust him forward to a long grating of snowless metal that ran like a band between two slightly sloping expanses of snow.  It felt warm to Graham’s benumbed feet, and a faint eddy of steam rose from it.

“Come on!” shouted his guide ten yards off, and, without waiting, ran swiftly through the incandescent glare towards the iron supports of the next range of wind-wheels.  Graham, recovering from his astonishment, followed as fast, convinced of his imminent capture....

In a score of seconds they were within a tracery of glare and black shadows shot with moving bars beneath the monstrous wheels.  Graham’s conductor ran on for some time, and suddenly darted sideways and vanished into a black shadow in the corner of the foot of a huge support.  In another moment Graham was beside him.