He felt himself a little figure, very small and ineffectual,
pitifully conspicuous. And all about him, the world was--_strange_.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE SILENT ROOMS
Presently Graham resumed his examination of his apartments. Curiosity
kept him moving in spite of his fatigue. The inner room, he perceived,
was high, and its ceiling dome shaped, with an oblong aperture in the
centre, opening into a funnel in which a wheel of broad vanes seemed to
be rotating, apparently driving the air up the shaft. The faint humming
note of its easy motion was the only clear sound in that quiet place. As
these vanes sprang up one after the other, Graham could get transient
glimpses of the sky. He was surprised to see a star.
This drew his attention to the fact that the bright lighting of these
rooms was due to a multitude of very faint glow lamps set about the
cornices. There were no windows. And he began to recall that along all
the vast chambers and passages he had traversed with Howard he had
observed no windows at all. Had there been windows? There were windows on
the street indeed, but were they for light? Or was the whole city lit day
and night for evermore, so that there was no night there?
And another thing dawned upon him. There was no fireplace in either room.
Was the season summer, and were these merely summer apartments, or was
the whole city uniformly heated or cooled? He became interested in these
questions, began examining the smooth texture of the walls, the simply
constructed bed, the ingenious arrangements by which the labour of
bedroom service was practically abolished.
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