He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous
drift towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a
process, if it was one and the same process, which involved riots in
Lodz, fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal
battlings in Manchuria, the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet
lost somewhere now in the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its
fate, he was trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend
its direction. He was struggling strenuously with the obscurities
of the language in which these things were being discussed about
him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of visual images
because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder that for a time
he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely
disconnected affair.
They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre
Square. Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-
looking men with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's
friends and guides to take him out and show him this and that.
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