is
self-opinionated machine for its inopportune destination. Do not rebuke
this person for his immoderate loss of mental gravity, for your mistake,
though pardonable in a stranger, is really excessively diverting. Your
most prudent course now will assuredly be to cast yourself from the
carriage without delay and rely upon the benevolent intervention of a
fire-chariot proceeding backwards."

Alas, it is truly said, "None but sword-swallowers should endeavour to
swallow swords," thereby signifying the vast chasm that lies between
those who are really adroit in an undertaking and those who only think
that they may easily become so. Presently it began to become deeply
impressed upon my discrimination that the journey was taking a more
lengthy duration than I had been given to understand would be the case,
while at the same time a permanent deliverance from the terrors of the
Beneath Parts seemed to be insidiously lengthening out into a funereal
unattainableness. The point of this person's destination, he had been
assured on all hands, was a spot beyond which even the most aggressively
assertive engine could not proceed, so that he had no fears of being
incapably drawn into more remote places, yet when hour after hour passed
and the ill-destined machine never failed in its malicious endeavours to
leave each successive tarrying station, it is not to be denied that
my imagination dwelt regretfully upon the true civilisation of our
own enlightened country, where, by the considerate intervention of an
all-wise government, the possibilities of so distressing an experience
are sympathetically removed from one's path. Thus the greater part of
the day had faded, and I was conjecturing that by this time we must
inevitably be approaching the barren and inhospitable country which
forms the northern limit of the Island, when the door suddenly opened
and the barbarian stranger whom I had left many hundred li behind
entered the carriage.

At this manifestation all uncertainty departed, and I now understood
that to some obscure end witchcraft of a very powerful and high-caste
kind was being employed around me; for in no other way was it credible
to one's intelligence that a person could propel himself through the
air with a speed greater than that of one of these fire-chariots, and
overtake it. Doubtless it was a part of this same scheme which made it
seem expedient to the stranger that he should feign a part, for he
at once greeted me a