He had a clear vision of entering a long corridor, and there were a number of girls sitting on low seats, as though in a class.  He saw no teacher, but only a novel apparatus from which he fancied a voice proceeded.  The girls regarded him and his conductor, he thought, with curiosity and astonishment.  But he was hurried on before he could form a clear idea of the gathering.  He judged they knew Howard and not himself, and that they wondered who he was.  This Howard, it seemed, was a person of importance.  But then he was also merely Graham’s guardian.  That was odd.

There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung so that he could see the feet and ankles of people going to and fro thereon, but no more of them.  Then vague impressions of galleries and of casual astonished passers-by turning round to stare after the two of them with their red-clad guard.

The stimulus of the restoratives he had taken was only temporary.  He was speedily fatigued by this excessive haste.  He asked Howard to slacken his speed.  Presently he was in a lift that had a window upon the great street space, but this was glazed and did not open, and they were too high for him to see the moving platforms below.  But he saw people going to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking bridges.

Thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it.  They crossed by means of a narrow bridge closed in with glass, so clear that it made him giddy even to remember it.  The floor of it also was of glass.  From his memory of the cliffs between New Quay and Boscastle, so remote in time, and so recent in his experience, it seemed to him that they must be near four hundred feet above the moving ways.  He stopped, looked down between his legs upon the swarming blue and red multitudes, minute and foreshortened, struggling and gesticulating still towards the little balcony far below, a little toy balcony, it seemed, where he had so recently been standing.  A thin haze and the glare of the mighty globes of light obscured everything.  A man seated in a little openwork cradle shot by from some point still higher than the little narrow bridge, rushing down a cable as swiftly almost as if he were falling.  Graham stopped involuntarily to watch this strange passenger vanish below, and then his eyes went back to the tumultuous struggle.

Along one of the faster ways rushed a thick crowd of red spots.  This broke up into individuals as it approached the balcony, and went pouring down the slower ways towards the dense struggling crowd on the central area.  These men in red appeared to be armed with sticks or truncheons; they seemed to be striking and thrusting.  A great shouting, cries of wrath, screaming, burst out and came up to Graham, faint and thin.  “Go on,” cried Howard, laying hands on him.

Another man rushed down a cable.  Graham suddenly glanced up to see whence he came, and beheld through the glassy roof and the network of cables and girders, dim rhythmically passing forms like the vanes of windmills, and between them glimpses of a remote and pallid sky.  Then Howard had thrust him forward across the bridge, and he was in a little narrow passage decorated with geometrical patterns.