He went westwards down Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly.

The Circus was a gleaming basin filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with lights.

Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in their flight.

Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings leading into the night.

The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden white facade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of the dark above them.