She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a
little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to
raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear
whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second effort,
wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting position
and looked about her.
Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a
vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been
destroyed.
At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.
She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a
world of heaped broken things. And it was lit--and somehow this was more
familiar to her mind than any other fact about her--by a flickering,
purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of
debris, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had
gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a
streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled
Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful,
luminous organisation of the War Control....
She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay,
and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding.
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