Now the watch-dog was asleep. Percy Darrow reflected that, were it not for the terror of these unexplainable hours, the prisoners within or their friends without could assail their confines boldly and formidably, even with dynamite, and none would be the wiser if only none happened to be within actual visual range of the operations. He himself quite coolly used the iron side piece to his bed as a battering-ram to break the locks of the door. Then he walked down the long corridor and out through the police station, bowing politely to the bewildered officers. The latter did not attempt to stop him. The people in the streets were, for the most part, either standing stock-still, or moving slowly forward in a groping sort of fashion. Darrow, for the second time, noticed how analogous to the deprivation of sight was the total deprivation of hearing and feeling vibration. Traffic was at a standstill. People's faces were bewildered, for the most part; though here and there one showed contorted with the hysteria of fright, or exalted with some other, probably religious, emotion. The same impression of ghostliness came to Darrow here as in the Atlas Building. Visual causes were not producing their wonted aural effect. On the street corner a peanut vender's little whistle sent aloft bravely its jet of steam; the bells on a ragpicker's cart swung merrily back and forth on their strap; a big truck, whose driver was either undaunted or drunk, banged and clattered and rattled over the rough cobbles of a side street--but no sound came from any one of them. This complete severance of one cause and effect was sufficient to discredit all natural laws. No other cause and effect was certain. Everywhere people were touching things to see if they were solid, or wet, or soft, or hard, as the case might be. Even Darrow felt, absurdly enough, that it would not be greatly serious to jump off the top of any building into the street. Darrow swung confidently enough down the street. He was the only person, with the exception of the drunken truck driver, who moved forward at a natural and easy gait. The effect was startling. Darrow seemed to be the only real human being of the lot. All the rest were phantasmagoric. But as he proceeded down-town the spell was beginning to break. People were communicating with one another by means of pencil and paper. Darrow was amused, on crossing the park, to see against the lighted windows on Newspaper Row the silhouetted forms of activity. Evidently, the newspaper men were already at work on this fresh story. Near the corner of the park Darrow saw standing a policeman of his varied acquaintance. The scientist walked up to this man, who was standing in the typical vacant uncertainty, smiled agreeably, clapped him on the back, and shook his hand. The patrolman grasped Darrow's hand, but the look of groping uncertainty deepened on his face.