earth or hell should hinder him from
professing Christianity even if he could not realise it. It was
Christianity alone that made life tolerable.

Percy drew a long vibrating breath, and changed his position; for far
away his unseeing eyes had descried a dome, like a blue bubble set on a
carpet of green; and his brain had interrupted itself to tell him that
this was Rome. He got up presently, passed out of his compartment, and
moved forward up the central gangway, seeing, as he went, through the
glass doors to right and left his fellow-passengers, some still asleep,
some staring out at the view, some reading. He put his eye to the glass
square in the door, and for a minute or two watched, fascinated, the
steady figure of the steerer at his post. There he stood motionless, his
hands on the steel circle that directed the vast wings, his eyes on the
wind-gauge that revealed to him as on the face of a clock both the force
and the direction of the high gusts; now and again his hands moved
slightly, and the huge fans responded, now lifting, now lowering.
Beneath him and in front, fixed on a circular table, were the glass
domes of various indicators--Percy did not know the meaning of half--one
seemed a kind of barometer, intended, he guessed, to declare the height
at which they were travelling, another a compass. And beyond, through
the curved windows, lay the enormous sky. Well, it was all very
wonderful, thought the priest, and it was with the force of which all
this was but one symptom that the supernatural had to compete.

He sighed, turned, and went back to his compartment.

It was an astonishing vision that began presently to open before
him--scarcely beautiful except for its strangeness, and as unreal as a
raised map. Far to his right, as he could see through the glass doors,
lay the grey line of the sea against the luminous sky, rising and
falling ever so slightly as the car, apparently motionless, tilted
imperceptibly against the western breeze; the only other movement was
the faint pulsation of the huge throbbing screw in the rear. To the left
stretched the limitless country, flitting beneath, in glimpses seen
between the motionless wings, with here and there the streak of a
village, flattened out of recognition, or the flash of water, and
bounded far away by the low masses of the Umbrian hills; while in front,
seen and gone again as the car veered, lay the confused line of Rome and
the huge new suburbs, all crown