e very far and were elusive of aspect. Sometimes they
were as a haze; sometimes like a carpet of twined flowers upon a slowly
heaving sea; sometimes they were liquid, and then the one to the east was
bluishly white, like milk, the one to the west like pooled molten gold.

Charles-Norton sat here long, his elbow on his knees, his chin in his
hand, his wings drooping behind, along the perpendicular smoothness of
the rock, and pondered his happiness. A profound satisfaction was within
him; it was as if his blood, at last, were flowing submissively along a
great cosmic stream, to some eternal behest. After a time, he rose
a-tip-toe, like a diver above a gleaming sheet, extended his wings, and
sprang.

At first he dropped plumb, into the abyss; then his spread wings caught
the air and held his fall. He gave one soft flap, and then another, and
rose. He floated upward; he was even with the top of the pinnacle, passed
it slowly, saw it beneath his feet, and still, with slow, strong beat of
wing, continued ascending. It was joyous work; he rose on powerful
pinion; it was as if his head and shoulders continuously were emerging
from one layer of the atmosphere into another more fresh and clear and
more beautiful; the air streamed along his skin in a clean, cold caress
that enveloped his soul. He passed big sad eagles that flew with lowered
beaks, their wrinkled and worried eyes upon the peaks below; he laughed,
and astounded, they fell off beneath him in vertiginous circles. The
earth beneath was like a bowl, a bowl full of plashing sunshine. He kept
on up, rising straight in the cold and hollow air, into a great silence,
the only sound that of his wings, beating a solemn measure. He looked no
longer down, now. Head rearing back, face to the sun, with half-closed
eyes he went on up with outspread wings, an ecstasy clutching at his
heart; clutching at it, clutching at it, till finally it was too
exquisite to bear, and half-swooning, with dangling pinion he let himself
swoop back through the dizzy spaces, back to the earth.

Again upon his pinnacle, he lay very still, long, on his back, breathing
deeply, while slowly the ecstatic languor left his body. He was a little
afraid of this game, this perpendicular assault of infinities, and
allowed it to himself only once a day. It was his dissipation; there was
something vaguely perilous in the absorption of it. So, having rested
now, he betook himself to less audacious pastimes.

He