They keft the cathedral behind and started on the line of stone and broken tarmac that had once been Cannon Street, but that was now more like the idea or the ghost of a road, on a landscape that might have been flat open country. Within a minute or two the sky seemed to have expanded over their heads giving the illusion of light; as before, however, they could not see so much as sense the devastation that lay about them:they tried to peer into the utter darkness of the ground, and they gazes slid about...They might have been walking through murky water, so absolutely strange and dense was the quality of the night here, and so freighted with violence and loss.