less motion, he
knew they kept up with him--strange inhabitants of the airless heights,
immense and misty-winged, with veiled, flaming eyes and silent feathers.
He was not afraid of them; for they were neither friendly nor hostile;
they were simply the beings of another world, alien and unknown.

But what puzzled him more was that the light and the darkness seemed
separate things, each distinctly visible. After each stroke of his wings
he _saw the darkness_ sift downwards past him through the air like dust.
It floated all round him in thinnest diaphanous texture--visible, not
because the moonlight made it so, but because in its inmost soul it was
itself luminous. It rose and fell in eddies, swirling wreaths, and
undulations; inwoven with starbeams, as with golden thread, it clothed
him about in circles of some magical primordial substance.

Even the stars, looking down upon him from terrifying heights, seemed
now draped, now undraped, as if by the sweeping of enormous wings that
stirred these sheets of visible darkness into a vast system of
circulation through the heavens. Everything in these oceans of upper
space apparently made use of wings, or the idea of wings. Perhaps even
the great earth itself, rolling from star to star, was moved by the
power of gigantic, invisible wings!...

Jimbo realised he had entered a forbidden region. He began to feel
afraid.

But the only possible expression of his fear, and its only possible
relief, lay in his own wings--and he used them with redoubled energy. He
dashed forward so fast that his face begun to burn, and he kept turning
his head in every direction for a sign of the governess, or for some
indication of where he could _escape to_. In the pauses of the wild
flight he heard the thunder of the following wings below. They were
still on his trail, and it seemed that they were gaining on him.

He took a new angle, realising that his only chance was to fly high; and
the new course took him perpendicularly away from the earth and straight
towards the moon. Later, when he had out-distanced the other creature,
he would drop down again to safer levels.

Yet the hours passed and it never overtook him. A measured distance was
steadily kept up between them as though with calculated purpose.

Curious distant voices shouted from time to time all manner of sentences
and rhymes in his ears, but he could neither understand nor remember
them. More and more the awful stillness of the vast