Lascars and children and Jews and I, we fought to get off the station platform; sometimes there wasn't room on the ground for both my feet at once.
The fires were still burning and smouldering there at midday, but a shower of rime fell on it, so that it looked like an old ruin, something done long ago.
At Pompeii, some one told me, one looked into the rooms and they were as they had been left—tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows, basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.
Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock—a fossil, as though it had been there for ever.
London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.
The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears upon the pillow.
"Can you get me a book, nurse?"
"Yes. What kind do you like?"
"Nothing fanciful; something that might be true."