ble and untold
distances. His speed kept increasing; he thought he had never found
flying so easy before; and the thunder of the following wings that held
persistently on his track made it dangerous for him to slacken up for
more than a minute here and there. The earth became a dark blot beneath
him, while the moon, rising higher and higher, grew weirdly bright and
close. How black the sky was; how piercing the points of starlight; how
stimulating the strong, new odours of these lofty regions! He realised
with a thrill of genuine awe that he had flown over the very edge of the
world, and the moment the thought entered his mind it was flung back at
him by a voice that seemed close to his ear one moment, and the next was
miles away in the space overhead. Light thoughts, born of the stars and
the moon and of his great speed, danced before his mind in fanciful
array. Once he laughed aloud at them, but once only. The sound of his
voice in these echoless spaces made him afraid.

The speed, too, affected his vision, for at one moment thin clouds
stretched across his face, and the next he was whirling through
perfectly clear air again with no vestige of a cloud in sight. The same
reason doubtless explained the sudden presence of sheets of light in
the air that reflected the moonlight like particles of glittering ice,
and then suddenly disappeared again. The terrific speed would explain a
good many things, but certainly it was curious how creatures formed out
of the hollow darkness, like foam before a steamer's bows, and moved
noiselessly away on either side to join the army of dim life that
crowded everywhere and watched his passage. For, in front and on both
sides, there gathered a vast assembly of silent forms more than shadows,
less than bodily shapes, that opened up a pathway as he rushed through
them, and then immediately closed up their ranks again when he had
passed. The air seemed packed with living creatures. Space was filled
with them. They surrounded him on all sides. Yet his passage through
them was like the passage of a hand through smoke; it was easy to make a
pathway, but the pathway left no traces behind it. More smoke rushed in
and filled the void.

He could never see these things properly, face to face; they always kept
just out of the line of vision, like shadows that follow a lonely walker
in a wood and vanish the moment he turns to look at them over his
shoulder. But ever by his side, with a steady, effort