wed those luckless words? Even as I spoke
the magic carpet quivered responsively under my feet, and an undulation
went all round the fringe as though a sudden wind were shaking it. It
humped up in the middle so abruptly that I came down sitting with a
shock that numbed me for the moment. It threw me on my back and
billowed up round me as though I were in the trough of a stormy sea.
Quicker than I can write it lapped a corner over and rolled me in its
folds like a chrysalis in a cocoon. I gave a wild yell and made one
frantic struggle, but it was too late. With the leathery strength of a
giant and the swiftness of an accomplished cigar-roller covering a
"core" with leaf, it swamped my efforts, straightened my limbs, rolled
me over, lapped me in fold after fold till head and feet and everything
were gone--crushed life and breath back into my innermost being, and
then, with the last particle of consciousness, I felt myself lifted
from the floor, pass once round the room, and finally shoot out, point
foremost, into space through the open window, and go up and up and up
with a sound of rending atmospheres that seemed to tear like riven silk
in one prolonged shriek under my head, and to close up in thunder
astern until my reeling senses could stand it no longer, and time and
space and circumstances all lost their meaning to me.

CHAPTER II

How long that wild rush lasted I have no means of judging. It may have
been an hour, a day, or many days, for I was throughout in a state of
suspended animation, but presently my senses began to return and with
them a sensation of lessening speed, a grateful relief to a heavy
pressure which had held my life crushed in its grasp, without
destroying it completely. It was just that sort of sensation though
more keen which, drowsy in his bunk, a traveller feels when he is
aware, without special perception, harbour is reached and a voyage
comes to an end. But in my case the slowing down was for a long time
comparative. Yet the sensation served to revive my scattered senses,
and just as I was awakening to a lively sense of amazement, an
incredible doubt of my own emotions, and an eager desire to know what
had happened, my strange conveyance oscillated once or twice, undulated
lightly up and down, like a woodpecker flying from tree to tree, and
then grounded, bows first, rolled over several times, then steadied
again, and, coming at last to rest, the next minute the infernal rug
open