  Light travel time delays distort the apparent shapes of HII regions
surrounding bright quasars during early stages of cosmic reionization.
Individual HII regions may remain undetectable in forthcoming redshifted 21 cm
experiments. However, the systematic deformation along the line of sight may be
detectable statistically, either by stacking tomographic 21cm images of quasars
identified, for example, by JWST, or as small-scale anisotropy in the
three-dimensional 21cm power spectrum. Here we consider the detectability of
this effect. The anisotropy is largest when HII regions are large and expand
rapidly, and we find that if bright quasars contributed to the early stages of
reionization, then they can produce significant anisotropy, on scales
comparable to the typical sizes of HII regions of the bright quasars (approx.
30 Mpc and below). The effect therefore cannot be ignored when analyzing future
21cm power spectra on small scales. If 10 percent of the volume of the IGM at
redshift z=10 is ionized by quasars with typical ionizing luminosity of S= 5 x
10^{56} photons/second, the distortions can enhance by more than 10 percent the
21cm power spectrum in the radial (redshift) direction, relative to the
transverse directions. The level of this anisotropy exceeds that due to
redshift-space distortion, and has the opposite sign. We show that on-going
experiments such as MWA should be able to detect this effect. A detection would
reveal the presence of bright quasars, and shed light on the ionizing yield and
age of the ionizing sources, and the distribution and small-scale clumping of
neutral intergalactic gas in their vicinity.
