There, too, was an astonishing sight.  The lamps still burned overhead, but beyond them lay the first pale streaks of the false dawn.  The street that ran now straight to the old royal palace, uniting there, as at the centre of a web, with those that came from Westminster, the Mall and Hyde Park, was one solid pavement of heads.  On this side and that rose up the hotels and “Houses of Joy,” the windows all ablaze with light, solemn and triumphant as if to welcome a king; while far ahead against the sky stood the monstrous palace outlined in fire, and alight from within like all other houses within view.  The noise was bewildering.  It was impossible to distinguish one sound from another.  Voices, horns, drums, the tramp of a thousand footsteps on the rubber pavements, the sombre roll of wheels from the station behind—­all united in one overwhelmingly solemn booming, overscored by shriller notes.

It was impossible to move.

He found himself standing in a position of extraordinary advantage, at the very top of the broad flight of steps that led down into the old station yard, now a wide space that united, on the left the broad road to the palace, and on the right Victoria Street, that showed like all else one vivid perspective of lights and heads.  Against the sky on his right rose up the illuminated head of the Cathedral Campanile.  It appeared to him as if he had known that in some previous existence.

He edged himself mechanically a foot or two to his left, till he clasped a pillar; then he waited, trying not to analyse his emotions, but to absorb them.

Gradually he became aware that this crowd was as no other that he had ever seen.  To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a unity unlike any other.  There was magnetism in the air.  There was a sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head.  The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this creative power which so expressed itself.  Here rested this giant humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see on every side, waiting, waiting for some consummation—­stretching, too, as his tired brain began to guess, down every thoroughfare of the vast city.

He did not even ask himself for what they waited.  He knew, yet he did not know.  He knew it was for a revelation—­for something that should crown their aspirations, and fix them so for ever.

He had a sense that he had seen all this before; and, like a child, he began to ask himself where it could have happened, until he remembered that it was so that he had once dreamt of the Judgment Day—­of humanity gathered to meet Jesus Christ—­Jesus Christ!  Ah! how tiny that Figure seemed to him now—­how far away—­real indeed, but insignificant to himself—­how hopelessly apart from this tremendous life!  He glanced up at the Campanile.  Yes; there was a piece of the True Cross there, was there not?—­a little piece of the wood on which a Poor Man had died twenty centuries ago....  Well, well.  It was a long way off....