to take off their heads. The people behind will have a
chance then. And as it happens, in this case, I had not so much taken
off my head as lost it. I had lost it on the road; on that strange
journey that was the cause of my coming in late. I have a troubled
recollection of having seen a very good play and made a very bad speech;
I have a cloudy recollection of talking to all sorts of nice people
afterwards, but talking to them jerkily and with half a head, as a man
talks when he has one eye on a clock.

And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock,
hung uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure
for such bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I
was moonstruck. A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had
inexplicably got in between me and all other scenes. If any one had
asked me I could not have said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothing
had occurred to me; except the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge
of a hill. It was not an adventure; it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small
car that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But as
night blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way
increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.
Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a
yet steeper road like a ladder.

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower
of Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage,
and the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car
and suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which
I am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his
great patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts
of South Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt."
The word "veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch.
But the meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him
a sense of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England.
Well, if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for
it in England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable
veldts. I saw six or seven separate eternities in cresting as many
different hills. One cannot find anything more infinite than a f