Graham became aware that this strange behaviour of the lights had to do with the people below.  The appearance of the houses and ways, the appearance of the packed masses changed, became a confusion of vivid lights and leaping shadows.  He saw a multitude of shadows had sprung into aggressive existence, seemed rushing up, broadening, widening, growing with steady swiftness—­to leap suddenly back and return reinforced.  The song and the tramping had ceased.  The unanimous march, he discovered, was arrested, there were eddies, a flow sideways, shouts of “The lights!” Voices were crying together one thing.  “The lights!” cried these voices.  “The lights!” He looked down.  In this dancing death of the lights the area of the street had suddenly become a monstrous struggle.  The huge white globes became purple-white, purple with a reddish glow, flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered between light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specks of glowing red in a vast obscurity.  In ten seconds the extinction was accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a black monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up those glittering myriads of men.

He felt invisible forms about him; his arms were gripped.  Something rapped sharply against his shin.  A voice bawled in his ear, “It is all right—­all right.”

Graham shook off the paralysis of his first astonishment.  He struck his forehead against Lincoln’s and bawled, “What is this darkness?”

“The Council has cut the currents that light the city.  We must wait—­stop.  The people will go on.  They will—­”

His voice was drowned.  Voices were shouting, “Save the Sleeper.  Take care of the Sleeper.”  A guard stumbled against Graham and hurt his hand by an inadvertent blow of his weapon.  A wild tumult tossed and whirled about him, growing, as it seemed, louder, denser, more furious each moment.  Fragments of recognisable sounds drove towards him, were whirled away from him as his mind reached out to grasp them.  Voices seemed to be shouting conflicting orders, other voices answered.  There were suddenly a succession of piercing screams close beneath them.

A voice bawled in his ear, “The red police,” and receded forthwith beyond his questions.

A crackling sound grew to distinctness, and therewith a leaping of faint flashes along the edge of the further ways.  By their light Graham saw the heads and bodies of a number of men, armed with weapons like those of his guards, leap into an instant’s dim visibility.  The whole area began to crackle, to flash with little instantaneous streaks of light, and abruptly the darkness rolled back like a curtain.

A glare of light dazzled his eyes, a vast seething expanse of struggling men confused his mind.  A shout, a burst of cheering, came across the ways.  He looked up to see the source of the light.  A man hung far overhead from the upper part of a cable, holding by a rope the blinding star that had driven the darkness back.