mile away. It
was of irregular outline, for the star-strewn sky showed in patches
and rifts above it. And this white mass curved away beneath, under
the ship in which he travelled, till it met, at a point which he
could but just discern, a blackness that rose to meet it.

Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he began to see
that the huge whiteness was flitting past, steadily and
leisurely, from right to left; that it was streaked with shadows
or clefts; and that following it, as in a sliding procession,
came another, like it, yet (it seemed) more distant.

All this time, too, the silence was profound. There was but a
soft humming note somewhere in the air, and the faintest sense of
vibration in the metal-work on which his hands were pressed. Once
too he heard a footstep pass softly and rhythmically overhead, as
if some watcher moved up and down the length of the upper deck.

The man dropped the curtains and sat back on his heels, trying
to force into his imagination the facts that he now perceived
and remembered.

They had left St. Germains last night, after dining at
Versailles. They were now crossing the Alps. They would be in
Rome for Mass and breakfast. . . . They were traversing at this
moment, no doubt, only a thousand feet high, one of those passes
up which (he thought he remembered from history) the old
railway-trains had been accustomed to climb, yard by yard and
spiral by spiral, a hundred years before . . .

In a minute or two he leaned forward and stared again, once more
closing the curtains behind his head.

The sky seemed a little brighter, he thought, than when he had
looked just now. Perhaps the moon was hiding somewhere. And
certainly the sky was more in evidence. Far away to the left
behind, passing even as he looked, moved those gigantic horns
of white, as if the ship stood still and the earth turned
beneath; and below now, sloping to the right, lay long lines of
darkness, jutting here and there with a sudden crag against the
blaze of stars. It was marvellous, he thought, how still all
lay; there was a steady hiss, now heard for the first time, as
the air tore past the glassy sides of the bird-shaped ship, as
thin as the cry of a bat.

He shifted on his knees a little, and staring forwards, saw far
ahead and at what seemed an incalculable distance something that
baffled him entirely, for it changed its aspect every instant
that he watched.

At first it was no more than a patch o