e, and the sounds quickly ceased from about
me.

"I had involuntarily closed my eyes at the great thunderclap, but now,
slowly, I opened them. I looked around me, first in stupefaction, and
then in growing amazement. For I was not in that familiar field at all,
sire, that I had been in a moment before. I was in a room, lying upon
its floor, and it was such a room as I had never seen before.

"Its walls were smooth and white and gleaming. There were windows in the
walls, and they were closed with sheets of glass so smooth and clear
that one seemed looking through a clear opening rather than through
glass. The floor was of stone, smooth and seamless as though carven from
one great rock, yet seeming not, in some way, to be stone at all. There
was a great circle of smooth metal inset in it, and it was on it that I
was lying.

"All around the room were many great things the like of which I had
never seen. Some seemed of black metal, seemed contrivances or machines
of some sort. Black cords of wire connected them to each other and from
part of them came a humming sound that did not stop. Others had glass
tubes fixed on the front of them, and there were square black plates on
which were many shining little handles and buttons.

"There was a sound of voices, and I turned to find that two men were
bending over me. They were men like myself, yet they were at the same
time like no men I had ever met! One was white-bearded and the other
plump and bare of face. Neither of them wore cloak or tunic or hose.
Instead they wore loose and straight-hanging garments of cloth.

"They were both greatly excited, it seemed, and were talking to each
other as they bent over me. I caught a word or two of their speech in a
moment, and found it was French they were talking. But it was not the
French I knew, being so strange and with so many new words as to be
almost a different language. I could understand the drift, though, of
what they were saying.

"'We have succeeded!' the plump one was shouting excitedly. 'We've
brought someone through at last!'

"'They will never believe it,' the other replied. 'They'll say it was
faked.'

"'Nonsense!' cried the first. 'We can do it again, Rastin; we can show
them before their own eyes!'

"They bent toward me, seeing me staring at them.

"'Where are you from?' shouted the plump-faced one. 'What time--what
year--what century?'

"'He doesn't understand, Thicourt,' muttered the white-bearded one.
'