The spectators saw the brass cap carefully fitted on the prelate's head. Then Sir William stepped to the little vulcanite table upon which the controlling switches were--there was a click, shutters rolled over the sky-lights in the roof, already obscured by the approach of evening, and the electric lights of the laboratory all went out simultaneously. The darkness was profound. The great experiment had begun. CHAPTER XXIII THE DOOM CONTINUES They were all watching, and watching very intently. All they could see was a bright circle of light which flashed out upon the opposite wall. It was just as though they were watching an ordinary exhibition of the magic-lantern or the cinematograph. And suddenly, swiftly, these world-worn and weary people of society, these scientists who lived by measure and by rule, saw that all Sir William Gouldesbrough had said was true--and truer than he himself knew. For upon this white screen, where all their eyes were fixed, there came a picture of the Holy City, and it was a picture such as no single person there had ever seen before. For it was not that definite and coloured presentment of a scene caught by the camera and reproduced through the mechanical means of a lens, which is a thing which has no soul. It was the picture of that Holy City to which all men's thoughts turn in trouble or in great crises of their lives. And it was a picture coloured by the imagination of the man who had just come back from Jerusalem, and who remembered it in the light of the Christian Faith and informed it with all the power of his own personality. They saw the sharp outlines of the olive trees, immemorially old, as a fringe to the picture. The sun was shining, the white domes and roofs were glistening, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre loomed up large in this vista, seen through a temperament, and through a memory, and seen from a hill. For a brief space, they all caught their breath and shuddered at the marvellous revelation of the power and magnificence of thought which was revealed to them at that moment. And then they watched the changing, shifting phantom, which was born from the thought of this good man, with a chill and shudder at the incredible wonder of it all. The afternoon, as it has been said, was thunderous and grim. While the representatives of the world that matters had been listening to Sir William, the forces of nature had been massing themselves upon the frontier-line of experience and thought. And now, at this great moment, the clouds broke, the thunder stammered, and in that darkened place the white and amethyst lightning came and flickered like a spear thrown from immensity. The gong of the thunder, the crack and flame of the lightning, passed. There was a dead silence. Still the spectators saw the mapped landscape of the Holy City shining before them, glad, radiant and serene.