There was no evidence of authority or control. If there were policemen, or soldiers, they must have been overwhelmed — or had torn off their insignia and joined the rush. I saw a man in the uniform of the Salvation Army; he stood on a step and bawled: “Eternity! Eternity!”

Moses pointed. “Look — the Dome is breached to the east, towards Stepney. So much for the impregnability of this marvelous Roof!”

I saw that he was right. It looked as if a great Bomb had punched an immense hole in the concrete shell, close to the eastern horizon. Above that main wound, the Dome had cracked like an eggshell, and a great irregular ribbon of blue sky was visible, almost all the way up to the Dome’s zenith above me. I could see that the damage hadn’t settled yet, for bits of masonry — some the size of houses — were raining down, all over that part of the city, and I knew that the damage and loss of life on the ground must be vast.

In the distance — to the north, I thought — I heard a sequence of dull booms, like the footsteps of a giant. All around us the air was rent by the wail of sirens — “ulla, ulla, ulla” — and by the immense groans of the broken Dome above us.

I imagined looking down from the Dome, on a London transformed in moments from a fearful but functioning city to a bowl of chaos and terror. Every road leading west, south or north, away from the Dome breach, would be stippled black with streaming refugees, with each dot in that stippling representing a human being, a mote of physical suffering and misery: each one a lost child, a bereft spouse or parent.

Moses had to shout over the cacophony of the street. “That confounded Dome is going to come down on us all, any minute!”

“I know. We must get to Imperial College. Come on — use your shoulders! Nebogipfel, help us if you can.”

We stepped to the middle of the crowded street. We had to go eastwards, against the flow of the crowd. Nebogipfel, evidently dazzled by the daylight, was almost knocked down by a running, moon-faced man in a business suit and epaulets who shook his fist at the Morlock. After that, Moses and I kept the Morlock between us, each with a skinny arm clamped in one fist. I collided with a cyclist, almost knocking him off his vehicle; he screamed at me, incoherent, and swung a bony punch, which I ducked; then he wobbled on into the press of people behind me, his tie draped over his shoulder. Now there, came a fat woman who stumbled backwards up the street, lugging a rolled-up carpet behind her; her skirt had ridden up over her knees, and her calves were streaked with dust. Every few feet, some other refugee would stand on her carpet, or a cyclist’s wheel would run over it, and the woman would stumble; she wore her mask, and I could see tears pooling behind those goggles as she struggled with the unreasonable, unmanageable mass that was so important to her.

Where I could see a human face it didn’t seem so bad, for I could feel a shard of fellow feeling for this red-eyed clerk, or that tired shopgirl; but, with the gas-masks, and in that patchy, shadowed illumination, the crowd was rendered anonymous and insectile; it was as if I had once more been transported away from the earth to some remote planet of nightmares.

Now there came a new sound — a thin, shrill monotone, which pierced the air. It seemed to me it came from that breach to the east. The crowds around us seemed to pause in their scrambling past each other, as if listening. Moses and I looked at each other, baffled as to the meaning of this new, menacing development.

Then the whistling stopped.

In the silence that followed, a single voice set up a call: “Shell! That’s a bloomin’ shell—”

Now I knew what those distant giant’s footsteps to the north had signified: it was the landing of an artillery barrage.

The pause broke. The panic erupted around us, more frantic than ever. I reached over Nebogipfel and grabbed at Moses’s shoulders; without ceremony I wrestled him, and the Morlock, to the ground, and a layer of people stumbled around us, covering us with warm, squirming flesh. In that last moment, as limbs battered against my face, I could hear the thin voice of that Salvation Army man, still shrieking out his call: “E-ternity! E-ternity!”

And then there was a flash, bright even under that heap of flesh, and a surge of motion through the earth. I was lifted up — my head cracked against another man’s — and then I was cast to the ground, for the moment insensible.

I awoke to find Moses with his hands under my arm-pits, dragging me from beneath fallen bodies. My foot caught on something — I think it was a bicycle-frame — and I cried out; Moses gave me a moment to twist my foot free of the obstruction, and then he hauled me free.

“Are you all right?” He touched my forehead with his fingertips, and they came away bloody. He had lost his knapsack, I saw.

I felt dizzy, and a huge pain seemed to be hovering around my head, waiting to descend; I knew that when I lost this momentary numbness, I should suffer indeed. But there was no time. “Where’s Nebogipfel?”

“Here.”

The Morlock stood in the street, unharmed; he had lost his cap, though, and his goggles were starred by some flying fragment. His notes were scattered about, their file having burst, and Nebogipfel watched the pages blow away.

People had been scattered like skittles by the blast and concussion. All round us, they lay in awkward positions, with body on top of body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes, old men on top of young women, a child lying on a soldier’s back. There was much stirring and groaning, as people struggled to rise — I was reminded of nothing so much as a heap of insects, squirming over each other — and here and there I saw splashes of blood, dark against flesh and clothing.

“My God,” Moses said with feeling. “We have to help these people. Can you see—?”

“No,” I snapped at him. “We can’t — there are too many; there’s nothing we can do. We’re lucky to be alive — don’t you see that? And now that the guns have got their range — Come! We have to stick to our intention; we have to escape from here, and into time.”

“I can’t bear it,” Moses said. “I’ve never seen such sights.”

The Morlock came up to us now. “I fear there’s worse to see before we’re done with this century of yours,” he said grimly.

So we went on. We stumbled over a road surface become slippery with blood and excrement. We passed a boy, moaning and helpless, evidently with a shattered leg; despite my earlier admonitions, Moses and I were quite unable to resist his plaintive weeping and cries for help, and we bent to lift him from where he lay, close to the body of a milkman, and we sat him up against a wall. A woman emerged from the crowd, saw the child’s plight and came to him; she began to wipe his face with a handkerchief.

“Is she his mother?” Moses asked me.

“I don’t know. I—”

That odd, liquid voice sounded behind us, like a call from another world. “Come.”

We went on, and at length we reached the corner of Queen’s Gate with the Terrace; and we saw how this had been the epicenter of the blast.

“No gas, at least,” I said.

“No,” Moses said, his voice tight. “But — oh, God! — this is enough!”

There was a crater, torn into the road surface, a few feet across. Doors were beaten in, and there was not a window left intact as far as I could see; curtains dangled, useless. There were subsidiary craters in the pavements and walls, left by bits of shrapnel from the exploded shell.

And the people…

Sometimes language is incapable of portraying the full horror of a scene; sometimes the communication of remembered events between humans, which is the basis of our shared society, breaks down. This was one such time. I could not communicate the horror of that London street to anyone who did not witness it.