He looked about.
"Oh, dear!
My spectacles are broken.
When I look round without them, I see things just as poorly as someone with good eyes does when he puts on spectacles.
It's most distressing."
Then he began to grumble about his lost heels.
"I'm short enough as it is, and now I'll be at least an inch shorter.
Perhaps even two inches shorter, since I lost both heels.
I guess I'll only be one inch shorter after all."
He was lying on top of a pile of broken bricks.
The tower had crumbled, all but a narrow piece of wall that stuck up out of the ground like a bone.
He could hear the sound of music coming from afar.
It was a lively waltz, carried on the wind.
The doctor raised his head.
Black broken beams hung above him.
Stars were shining in the blue-green evening sky.
"I wonder where the music's coming from?"
The doctor was beginning to feel chilly without his cape.
There was not a sound to be heard in the square.
He groaned as he picked himself up from among the fallen stones.
Then he stumbled on someone's large boot.
The locksmith was lying across a beam, gazing up at the sky.
The doctor shook him.
But the locksmith did not move.
He was dead.
The doctor raised his hand to take off his hat.
"I've lost my hat, too," he said.
"Now, where shall I go?"
He left the square.
There were people lying in the road. The doctor bent over each one and saw the stars reflected in their eyes.
He touched their foreheads.
They were dead.
"So that's how it is!" he whispered.
"That means the people have been beaten.
What will become of us?"
Half an hour later he reached a crowded, brightly lit street.
He was very tired.
He was hungry and thirsty, too.
Here the town looked as it always did.
The doctor stood at a crossing, resting from his long walk.
"How strange," he thought.
"There are coloured lights shining in the windows, carriages roll by, glass doors open and shut.
People are dancing in that house.
They're probably having a party.
There are Chinese lanterns swinging over the dark waters.
It's just as if it were yesterday here.
Don't they know what happened this morning?
Didn't they hear the shooting and the cries of the wounded?
Don't they know that the people's leader, Prospero the Gunsmith, has been captured?
But perhaps nothing really happened, perhaps it was all a bad dream?"