Above was a slow
insensible change, the advance of night serene and beautiful; below was
hurry, excitement, conflicting orders, pauses, spasmodic developments of
organisation, a vast ascending clamour and confusion. Before the Council
came out, toiling perspiring men, directed by a conflict of shouts,
carried forth hundreds of those who had perished in the hand-to-hand
conflict within those long passages and chambers....
Guards in black lined the way that the Council would come, and as far as
the eye could reach into the hazy blue twilight of the ruins, and
swarming now at every possible point in the captured Council House and
along the shattered cliff of its circumadjacent buildings, were
innumerable people, and their voices, even when they were not cheering,
were as the soughing of the sea upon a pebble beach. Ostrog had chosen a
huge commanding pile of crushed and overthrown masonry, and on this a
stage of timbers and metal girders was being hastily constructed. Its
essential parts were complete, but humming and clangorous machinery still
glared fitfully in the shadows beneath this temporary edifice.
The stage had a small higher portion on which Graham stood with Ostrog
and Lincoln close beside him, a little in advance of a group of minor
officers. A broader lower stage surrounded this quarter-deck, and on this
were the black-uniformed guards of the revolt armed with the little green
weapons whose very names Graham still did not know.
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