I turned to the right. Here, where the bridge from the Temple entered the fort of the airships, I saw an airscout in blue, with the white swan on his breast, watching me. Again I stopped. My mind was awhirl with the horrors that I had seen; I could not think! I did not know what to do. All exit seemed barred to me except that whereby I had come.
Beneath me lay the court, a broad expanse of white, inlaid with geometrical figures of green grass. On it crawled tiny figures in blue. I was halfway between the court below and the Temple dome above; yet everything was so still that the voices below came up to me.
A group had gathered, chattering excitedly, about something that lay hard by the Temple entrance. As they moved this way and that I saw that it had been a woman. She had been young; her garments had been white; there was a gold palm on a torn-off fragment that a gust of wind drove up toward me. I caught at it, but it went sailing past and fluttered down in the central court between the buildings.
I saw the spectators look up toward the aerial gardens. The blood-red creeping vine now swung from an open crystal door. That paradise of tropic beauty, those flame-colored flowers were such as blossom in hell.
The crystal door above me clashed to and reopened as the wind caught it. It seemed to clang rhythmically, like a clear tocsin, high up beneath the dome, a bell of doom to warn the blood-stained city. Again it sounded like a workman’s hammer; and the silence that covered everything made the sounds more ominous and dread, as if Fate were hammering out the minutes remaining before she slashed her thread.
An old man pushed his way through the gathering crowd. He peered into the white face, and wrung his hands, and wept, and his voice rose in a high, penetrating wail.
“It’ll all be ended,” I heard him cry. “I can’t work now. I can’t make up my time. I’ve spent my credit margin. I’m old and outed and done with. I’ll have to go to the Comfortable Bedroom.”
It was the old man whom I had seen earlier that day. The crowd jeered and pressed forward, those who were behind craning their necks and rising on their toes to see the joint spectacle of death and grief. The old man shook his gnarled fist at his dead daughter.
“You’ve killed me,” he sobbed in rage. “Why couldn’t you have stayed up there till Sanson has made us all immortal? I’m going to the Comfortable Bedroom now, and my body will die like a beast’s, and I’ll be ended.”
And he broke into atrocious curses, while the crowd screamed with delight and mocked his passion.