Peering through a kind of butler's window, he saw beyond the shrine his two pallid subordinates, like mystic automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway.

Beyond them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living phantoms of the street.

It seemed a fit setting for his fears.

"I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and buried his face.
On the tin pent-roof, the rain trampled inexorably.
At last, mustering a shaky resolution, he set to work ransacking the tumbled papers.

Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion.