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

293

Tales of Space and Time