adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed among
levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant stretches of winter
greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges of houses. But for the
most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the wreckage of suburban
villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer islands amidst the
levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned indeed by the inhabitants
years since, but too substantial, it seemed, to be cleared out of the way
of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms of the time.

The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the countless
cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of the city wall
in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and tall grasses. Here
and there gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst the puny remains of
Victorian times, and cable ways slanted to them from the city. That
winter day they seemed deserted. Deserted, too, were the artificial
gardens among the ruins. The city limits were indeed as sharply defined
as in the ancient days when the gates were shut at nightfall and the
robber foeman prowled to the very walls. A huge semi-circular throat
poured out a vigorous traffic upon the Eadhamite Bath Road. So the first
prospect of the world beyond the city flashed on Graham, and dwindled.
And when at last he could look vertically downward again, he saw below
him the vegetable fields of the Thames valley--innumerable minute oblongs
of ruddy brown, intersected by shining threads, the sewage ditches.

His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication. He
found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring to
shout. After a time that desire became too strong for him, and he
shouted. They curved about towards the south. They drove with a slight
list to leeward, and with a slow alternation of movement, first a short,
sharp ascent and then a long downward glide that was very swift and
pleasing. During these downward glides the propeller was inactive
altogether. These ascents gave Graham a glorious sense of successful
effort; the descents through the rarefied air were beyond all experience.
He wanted never to leave the upper air again.

For a time he was intent upon the landscape that ran swiftly northward
beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him exceedingly. He was
impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once dotted the country, by
the vast treeless expanse of country from w