cIan
was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark--especially
upon moonlight nights. The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive
magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster
attitude. Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it
is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the
word. It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy. The sun is
in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our
bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen. But the moon is a much simpler
thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing. It hangs in the sky quite
solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial
snowball. It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which
led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out
as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night, when
the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the garden until
almost the strongest tints to be seen were the strong soft blue of the
sky and the large lemon moon. He was walking with his face turned up to
it in that rather half-witted fashion which might have excused the error
of his keepers; and as he gazed he became aware of something little and
lustrous flying close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked
off the moon. At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction
in his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes. Then he thought
it was a falling star; only it did not fall. It jerked awkwardly up and
down in a way unknown among meteors and strangely reminiscent of the
works of man. The next moment the thing drove right across the moon,
and from being silver upon blue, suddenly became black upon silver;
then although it passed the field of light in a flash its outline was
unmistakable though eccentric. It was a flying ship.

The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came
nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend. It
was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of
Sir Galahad. The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as
it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only
figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with
snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction. The
figure stood so still that he could easily have supposed i