And not ten hours ago he had stood beneath the ventilating fans in a little chamber within that remote building wondering what was happening in the world!

Looking more attentively as this warlike episode moved silently across the centre of the mirror, Graham saw that the white building was surrounded on every side by ruins, and Ostrog proceeded to describe in concise phrases how its defenders had sought by such destruction to isolate themselves from a storm.  He spoke of the loss of men that huge downfall had entailed in an indifferent tone.  He indicated an improvised mortuary among the wreckage, showed ambulances swarming like cheese-mites along a ruinous groove that had once been a street of moving ways.  He was more interested in pointing out the parts of the Council House, the distribution of the besiegers.  In a little while the civil contest that had convulsed London was no longer a mystery to Graham.  It was no tumultuous revolt had occurred that night, no equal warfare, but a splendidly organised coup d’etat.  Ostrog’s grasp of details was astonishing; he seemed to know the business of even the smallest knot of black and red specks that crawled amidst these places.

He stretched a huge black arm across the luminous picture, and showed the room whence Graham had escaped, and across the chasm of ruins the course of his flight.  Graham recognised the gulf across which the gutter ran, and the wind-wheels where he had crouched from the flying machine.  The rest of his path had succumbed to the explosion.  He looked again at the Council House, and it was already half hidden, and on the right a hillside with a cluster of domes and pinnacles, hazy, dim and distant, was gliding into view.

“And the Council is really overthrown?” he said.

“Overthrown,” said Ostrog.

“And I—.  Is it indeed true that I—?”

“You are Master of the World.”

“But that white flag—­”

“That is the flag of the Council—­the flag of the Rule of the World.  It will fall.  The fight is over.  Their attack on the theatre was their last frantic struggle.  They have only a thousand men or so, and some of these men will be disloyal.  They have little ammunition.  And we are reviving the ancient arts.  We are casting guns.”

“But—­help.  Is this city the world?”

“Practically this is all they have left to them of their empire.  Abroad the cities have either revolted with us or wait the issue.  Your awakening has perplexed them, paralysed them.”

“But haven’t the Council flying machines?  Why is there no fighting with them?”