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He looked about him so far as his flapping jacket would permit. The
appearance of things was really extremely strange. "The sky's all right
anyhow," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And that's about all that is all right.
And even there it looks like a terrific gale coming up. But there's the
moon overhead. Just as it was just now. Bright as midday. But as for the
rest--Where's the village? Where's--where's anything? And what on earth
set this wind a-blowing? I didn't order no wind."
Mr. Fotheringay struggled to get to his feet in vain, and after one
failure, remained on all fours, holding on. He surveyed the moonlit
world to leeward, with the tails of his jacket streaming over his head.
"
There's something seriously wrong," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And what it
is--goodness knows."
Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of
dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and
heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only a
wilderness of disorder vanishing at last into the darkness beneath the
whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of a
swiftly rising storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that
might once have been an elm-tree, a smashed mass of splinters, shivered
from boughs to base, and further a twisted mass of iron girders--only
too evidently the viaduct--rose out of the piled confusion.
You see, when Mr. Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid
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