don't think the people here want air-ships. They can fly themselves.
Look! there are a lot of them coming to meet us. That was a rather
wicked remark of yours, Lenox, about the half-way house to heaven; but
those certainly do look something like angels."

As Zaidie said this, after a somewhat lengthy pause, during which the
_Astronef_ had descended to within a few hundred feet of the
mountain-spur, she handed her field-glasses to her husband, and pointed
downwards towards an island which lay a couple or miles or so off the
end of the spur.

He put the glasses to his eyes, and took a long look through them.
Moving them slowly up and down, and from side to side, he saw hundreds
of winged figures rising from the island and floating towards them.

"You were right, dear," he said, without taking the glass from his eyes,
"and so was I. If those aren't angels, they're certainly something like
men, and, I suppose, women too who can fly. We may as well stop here and
wait for them. I wonder what sort of an animal they take the _Astronef_
for."

He sent a message down the tube to Murgatroyd and gave a turn and a half
to the steering-wheel. The propellers slowed down and the _Astronef_
dropped with a hardly-perceptible shock in the midst of a little plateau
covered with a thick, soft moss of a pale yellowish green, and fringed
by a belt of trees which seemed to be over three hundred feet high, and
whose foliage was a deep golden bronze.

They had scarcely landed before the flying figures reappeared over the
tree tops and swept downwards in long spiral curves towards the
_Astronef_.

"If they're not angels, they're very like them," said Zaidie, putting
down her glasses.

"There's one thing, they fly a lot better than the old masters' angels
or Dore's could have done, because they have tails--or at least
something that seems to serve the same purpose, and yet they haven't got
feathers."

"Yes, they have, at least round the edges of their wings or whatever
they are, and they've got clothes, too, silk tunics or something of that
sort--and there are men and women."

"You're quite right, those fringes down their legs are feathers, and
that's how they can fly. They seem to have four arms."

The flying figures which came hovering near to the _Astronef_, without
evincing any apparent sign of fear, were the strangest that human eyes
had looked upon. In some respects they had a sufficient resemblance for
them to be taken for win