Then there was a shout that shook the company as they made it, men and women rose and raised their cups and cried, “The Divine Downfall of Atlan!” They howled it in a fervour of loyalty and enthusiasm to their cause and their hosts. I had never heard anything so ugly. They were like wild beasts, bejewelled and emblazoned, tearing down with their drunken opened mouths in their eager, dedicated, drunken faces over their gravy-splashed, wine-stained uniforms, tearing down all that was left divine in the world for no other reason than that it is divine, for they can know nothing of what they will find behind the airless sea, whether it will be rich or worth their trouble, and they call their tearing-down divine. The company cried out its great toast again and again, the glasses splintered and the tapestries gusted from the walls in the howling hall. Zerd lay back, his dark face less aloof than I have ever seen it, on it a fierce abandonment to the toast He drank with long slow deliberate-spaced gulps, as though it were the savoury blood of Atlanteans there in his goblet. The Hammerfist on the table screamed like a madman and there was froth on his lips. It may only have been from the wine, I don’t know. There was a crash as one of the iron candelabra dashed from the roof-beams to the table below. There were screams from those around it, but I doubt if most of the company even noticed it A woman had been crushed under it; some of the men with her hauled it up long enough for her to be dragged from beneath it. She lay whimpering on the table and presently died. The shout continued and continued: wine-cups were filled again and again. It had all been so unexpected that I was still staring fascinated at the suddenness of this exultant mob-mania (“The Divine Downfall of Atlan!” “The Divine Downfall!”) after the innocuous tenor of a diplomatic banquet at which people worried about the bluff intentions of the Hammerfist for a dancer, when two men hurled past me and lay on the floor and lay there shrilly laughing and screaming. “The Divine Downfall!” as they writhed. At first I thought they were fighting, then I realized and looked away. I tried to make my way to the exit. I was thrust aside again and again by fighting and loving couples