About the book: 1925 / On the island of Great Britain, in London there was fog and the clocks on the towers, on the corners, in the offices reached five. And at five, after business, a human wave began to flow out of the City. The Great War has died, from the medieval corners of the City, where before the war only black top hats, frock coats and umbrellas of men, a black crowd of gravediggers, lived and performed sacred functions in houses with the dates 1547, 1494, now flowed a motley crowd of canvas coats, gray hats and female tapists, pink hats, woolen skirts, stockings like goose feet, multi-colored umbrellas. The fog moved with the crowd, the fog stopped in the nooks and crannies where cripples drew ships, mountains, glaciers on the sidewalks of churches so that they could be given pennies for bread. And a quarter of an hour later the City was empty, because the crowd either fell through the elevators into the ground and was thrown along underground roads to all ends of London and the outskirts, or crawled onto the ridges of elephant-like buses, or darted like water bugs of Royces and Fords into the alleys of fog. The City was left deserted to count down its centuries.