ere the
audible swishing of feathers. It was near enough for that.

Jimbo could never properly see what was following him. A shadow between
him and the earth was all he could distinguish, but in the centre of
that shadow there seemed to burn two glowing eyes. Two brilliant lights
flashed whenever he looked down, like the lamps of a revolving
lighthouse. But other things he saw, too, when he looked down, and once
the earth rose close to his face so that he could have touched it with
his hands. The same instant it dropped away again with a rush of
whirlwinds, and became a distant shadow miles and miles below him. But
before it went, he had time to see the Empty House standing within its
gloomy yard, and the horror of it gave him fresh impetus.

Another time when the world raced up close to his eyes he saw a scene of
a different kind that stirred a passionately deep yearning within him--a
house overgrown with ivy and standing among trees and gardens, with
laburnums and lilacs flowering on smooth green lawns, and a clean
gravel drive leading down to a big pair of iron gates. Oh, it all seemed
so familiar! Perhaps in another minute the well-known figures would have
appeared and spoken to him. Already he heard their voices behind the
bushes. But, just before they appeared, the earth dropped back with a
roar of a thousand winds, and Jimbo saw instead the shadow of the
Pursuer mounting, mounting, mounting towards him. Up he shot again with
terror in his heart, and all trembling with the thunder of the great
star-voices above. He felt like a leaf in a hurricane, "lost, dizzy,
shelterless."

Voices, too, now began to be heard more frequently. They dropped upon
him out of the reaches of this endless void; and with them sometimes
came forms that shot past him with amazing swiftness, racing into the
empty Beyond as though sucked into a vast vacuum. The very stars seemed
to move. He became part of some much larger movement in which he was
engulfed and merged. He could no longer think of himself as Jimbo. When
he uttered his own name he saw merely a mass of wind and colour through
which the great pulses of space and the planets beat tumultuously,
lapping him round with the currents of a terrific motion that seemed to
swallow up his own little personality entirely, while giving him
something infinitely greater....

But surely these small voices, shrill and trumpet-like, did not come
from the stars! these deep whispers that ran roun