A Victorian artist could have painted the scene on the lawn of Buckingham Palace. The men in cutaways, the women wearing hats adorned with trembling feathers, and an assemblage of every imaginable type of sari and burnoose you could find in the British Commonwealth. So splendid, so light, so cheerful -- and so London. And in the center of it all is Her Majesty, graciously attending to her guests.

Halberdiers clear the way for Queen Elizabeth II to enter the royal tea pavilion, and the guests stroll through the rose gardens. This ceremony of a lost world can still enchant, on this mild, sunny summer afternoon, no matter what happens on the other side of Buckingham Palace's walls in the modern world.

It's a Thursday afternoon at the Windsor place, during one of those royal garden parties Queen Victoria introduced around 1860. In London circa 2005, just beyond the palace walls, bombs are going off, helicopters are buzzing overhead and sirens are wailing.

The queen looks pale. But she lifts her tea cup, seemingly deaf to the noises of London in 2005, and doesn't talk about terror. She's going on with business as usual, doing her part, just like everyone else these days. It's also a show of the unity Londoners are feeling in their calmness and strength.

At least that's the way Londoners would like to see themselves. "We remain resolute," said Chief of Police Ian Blair on Friday, "the situation is under control."

But the truth is that London is nervous and on edge. Ian Blair has also heard the rumors about threats to various communities, but his message to the residents of a city who must live in constant fear is to "listen to the facts." And everyone in London is doing his best to close ranks against this absurd crusade of the terrorists.

The first time, on July 7, three bombs exploded in the London Underground and one on a double-decker bus. This time around, on July 21, the terrorists copied the first attack, using backpacks and dark cases to carry three bombs onto Underground trains and one onto a bus. It was an act of cynicism and it went wrong, but it was nevertheless a demonstration of pure power. The message of the second attack seemed to be: We do as we wish, we're playing with you, we'll be back at our leisure and there's nothing you can do about it.

But the attack also showed a shift in strategy amongst the terrorists. Instead of launching the spectacular post-9/11 attacks once promised by Osama bin Laden, we will instead increase the frequency of attacks and we will reach you in your daily lives. Anywhere you go, you will always be in danger. And for the second time, the sites of the bombings formed a crucifix across the city.

This time, it began at 12:20 p.m. at Shepherd's Bush Station in West London. There was a loud bang and a man dove to the ground. He quickly jumped up and ran away, but he was filmed by surveillance cameras at 12:21 p.m.

12:30 p.m., Oval Station in South London. There's an unusual smell on the train. Passengers scream and a man flees. Three passengers try to capture the man, but he manages to get away. He's wearing a sweater emblazoned with the words "New York."

12:39 p.m., Warren Street Station in North London. A man reaches for his back pack, but the back pack explodes. "The man seemed shocked," says an eyewitness. Shocked because he was alive? The man flees.

1:06 p.m., Hackney Road in East London. "I heard a bang," says bus driver Mark Maybanks, "and I went upstairs. There was smoke in the air." The bomber, captured on camera while fleeing, isn't young or slender, and he wears a white baseball cap.

Who were these four men? There were arrests in London and Birmingham.

The four men were carrying explosives that were about as heavy and could have caused as much devastation as the bombs of July 7. But the fact that four bombs worked on July 7 and that four bombs failed two weeks later leads to certain conclusions. Perhaps it was a second cell completely unrelated to the first one. Perhaps they assembled their bombs in a kitchen. Police chief Blair said: "We are looking for criminals, not groups."

Despite such statements, the city isn't any less nervous. London's traditional harmony among ethnicities and religions has been upset, and the conservatives blame liberal "self-hatred." There are reports of an alleged firebombing of the house of suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay. The East London Mosque, one of London's largest, is closed temporarily -- supposedly because of a bomb threat.

"It's always the second attack that causes the most fear," says an expert on the BBC, a man who doesn't sound especially certain of victory. He sounds tired and irritable. The drivers listening to his voice on the radio as they crawl through the city's traffic jams presumably feel the same.

The first attack shocked everyone because it occurred despite London's heavy security. But the second attack, even without killing anyone, has spread the virus of fear. The new feeling in London these days is that the attackers are nearby, that they are in our midst.

The city calls for security, for authorities to strike back. How many of these subway passengers will be extracted from the crowds in the coming days? But, more importantly, how many will not? There will be more attacks in the coming months, says the BBC expert.

The last victim, the 56th person killed in the attacks of July 7, was identified only last Wednesday. He was a 24-year-old student from Afghanistan, Ateeque Sharifi. His parents were killed by the Taliban four years ago. Sharifi had fled from Kabul to Great Britain so that he could live in safety. He died at King's Cross Station.

Must London live in fear once again? Live with the constant fear of attack? The newspapers write that they're reminded of the "Blitz," the German Luftwaffe's air raids during World War II. And Mayor Ken Livingstone is reminding Londoners of the days of IRA terror.

After the attacks of July 7, Livingstone said: "London is the whole world in one city." Of course, he meant it as something positive: London as a multicultural metropolis of immigrants, so tolerant, so peaceful, so free. But now this same sentence can be interpreted in a completely different way: Is not the city also a mirror of the world's problems?

It's a political question that is very much on the minds of Londoners these days: Are the attacks a reaction to world politics? A punishment for the war in Iraq? Britons believe that those behind the attacks are in Pakistan, but that there is one person responsible in London: British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A report by Chatham House, the former Royal Institute of International Affairs, concludes: "There is no doubt that the situation in Iraq has caused special difficulties for the United Kingdom." And in an opinion poll conducted by the Guardian, one-third of respondents said the prime minister bore "a lot of" responsibility for the attacks. Only 28 percent were of the opinion still held, at least publicly, by Tony Blair that the Iraq war had nothing to do with the attacks.

"Parallel universes"

One could ask the people why assassins kill people, but one could also ask Lord Ahmed.

For a man whose execution has been ordered in a fatwa, Lord Ahmed, 48, seems rather unruffled -- a bit tired, perhaps, after the strains of the last two weeks. Lord Ahmed sprawls on a desk chair in a small room. "There is a small minority among Muslims who are in a state of war, and we can no longer ignore them," says Lord Ahmed. "The Muslims have lived in their parallel universe for too long. They have lived in this country, but not as part of this country."

If that's the rule, then Lord Ahmed is the exception. He was the first Muslim to get appointed to the House of Lords, a stronghold of the British establishment. He took his oath seven years ago with his hand on the Koran and has since become a leading representative of Britain's Muslims.

Everyone wants to talk to Lord Ahmed these days. What's happening here, they ask? What do the murderers want? What can we do? These are the questions London is asking, the questions Tony Blair is asking. "Some radical Muslims are taking advantage of freedom of speech," Lord Ahmed told the Prime Minister Blair, calling again for a crackdown on preachers of hate. In response, the extremist Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun issued a fatwa, or death threat, against Lord Ahmed.

Lord Ahmed says he is a "practicing Muslim." At the age of 11, Nazir Ahmed arrived with his parents from Pakistan in the northern English steel mill town of Rotherham. At first he helped his parents in their fish and chips shop, but then he decided to become a local politician. And then he was elected and reelected -- a political success story. But Lord Ahmed knows full well, and is quick to say so, that his career path is not open to every child of immigrants.

Take Shehzad Tanweer, for example, who was also a child of Pakistani immigrants, and who also sold fish and chips in his father's shop -- Shehzad Tanweer was one of the suicide bombers from Leeds.

"Many young people are experiencing an identity crisis today," says Ahmed. He believes that the men and women of his generation saw themselves as guests in Great Britain. Today's young Muslims, on the other hand, were born as Britons, while their parents remained rooted in their traditions. At the mosque, the young men of this generation had to live according to the values of their fathers, but in school they were confronted with the freedoms enjoyed by their non-Muslim schoolmates.

"This makes them susceptible to radical imams," says Lord Ahmed; "we must work on putting an end to this ghettoizing of British Muslims." Some ideologues, he says, have identified these young people "as a good recruiting base."

But is the problem really that clear? Or is it one of those theories that can just as easily be countered with another?

The new jihadism

Olivier Roy, author of "Globalized Islam," wrote in the German weekly Die Zeit that the new jihadism is an "expression of a cultural crisis" and a "pathological consequence of the Westernization of Islam." What Roy means is that young men, torn between two worlds, perceive society as diabolical and far too secular and, like a sect, have worked their way into an "emotional and anti-intellectual faith." And the faith of this sect no longer has to have anything to do with Iraq, with strict parents or even with Osama bin Laden. There probably is no clear profile for the second generation of suicide bombers. Some hate consumerism, some hate their teachers and others hate American imperialism. The Iraq war could be a cause for some.

The terrorists of this second generation are "psychopathic and clever, nihilistic and rational, and they glorify death for death's sake. At the same time, they calculate precisely whom to kill, what effect to produce, and when," writes Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. And who is leading them?

After the Madrid bombings in 2004, Spanish authorities spent months looking for a mastermind. At one point they believed that it was an al-Qaida member who was later killed in Saudi Arabia, but then that theory was debunked, and the Spaniards now believe that it's possible that a single architect of the attack never existed.

Will the "big fish" materialize?