hich all farms and villages
had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known the thing was so, but
seeing it so was an altogether different matter. He tried to make out
familiar places within the hollow basin of the world below, but at first
he could distinguish no data now that the Thames valley was left behind.
Soon, however, they were driving over a sharp chalk hill that he
recognised as the Guildford Hog's Back, because of the familiar outline
of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of the ruins of the town
that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge. And from that he made out
other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes of Aldershot, and so forth.
Save where the broad Eadhamite Portsmouth Road, thickly dotted with
rushing shapes, followed the course of the old railway, the gorge of the
wey was choked with thickets.

The whole expanse of the Downs escarpment, so far as the grey haze
permitted him to see, was set with wind-wheels to which the largest of
the city was but a younger brother. They stirred with a stately motion
before the south-west wind. And here and there were patches dotted with
the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted
shepherd made a spot of black. Then rushing under the stern of the
monoplane came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and
Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob
the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was
speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black oxen
stampeded before a couple of mounted men. Swiftly these swept behind, and
dwindled and lost colour, and became scarce moving specks that were
swallowed up in haze.

And when these had vanished in the distance Graham heard a peewit
wailing close at hand. He perceived he was now above the South Downs, and
staring over his shoulder saw the battlements of Portsmouth Landing Stage
towering over the ridge of Portsdown Hill. In another moment there came
into sight a spread of shipping like floating cities, the little white
cliffs of the Needles dwarfed and sunlit, and the grey and glittering
waters of the narrow sea. They seemed to leap the Solent in a moment, and
in a few seconds the Isle of Wight was running past, and then beneath him
spread a wider and wider extent of sea, here purple with the shadow of a
cloud, here grey, here a burnished mirror, and here a spread of cloudy
greenish blue. The Isle of Wight