The windows seemed infinite in number, the streets endless in their complications: yet everything was deserted.
At this hour the streets were empty, and would remain so until daylight.

Not a soul was stirring; no face looked from any of those myriads of glowing windows; no footfall disturbed the silence of those asphalt streets.

There, almost within call behind those windows, shut off from those empty streets, a thousand human lives were teeming, each the centre of its own circle of thoughts and words and actions; and yet the solitude was profound, the desolation complete, the stillness unbroken by a single echo.
The night--the last night of the old year--was fine; the white, clear light from a moon they could not see grew wide and clear over the city, as the last gleam of the sunset faded.

It was just warm enough for the window to be open, and for nearly three hours Condy and Blix sat looking down upon the city in these last moments of the passing year, feeling upon their faces an occasional touch of the breeze, that carried with it the smell of trees and flowers from the gardens below them, and the faint fine taint of the ocean from far out beyond the Heads.

But the scene was not in reality silent.