ob, throb, throb--beat, went the engine; throb, throb,
throb--beat. He gripped his bars tightly, glanced at the aeronaut, and
saw a smile upon his sun-tanned face. He smiled in return--perhaps a
little artificially. "A little strange at first," he shouted before he
recalled his dignity. But he dared not look down again for some time. He
stared over the aeronaut's head to where a rim of vague blue horizon
crept up the sky. For a little while he could not banish the thought of
possible accidents from his mind. Throb, throb, throb--beat; suppose some
trivial screw went wrong in that supporting engine! Suppose--! He made a
grim effort to dismiss all such suppositions. After a while they did at
least abandon the foreground of his thoughts. And up he went steadily,
higher and higher into the clear air.

Once the mental shock of moving unsupported through the air was over,
his sensations ceased to be unpleasant, became very speedily
pleasurable. He had been warned of air sickness. But he found the
pulsating movement of the monoplane as it drove up the faint south-west
breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to
broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good
sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they
ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration. He looked up
and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came
cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of white
birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space he watched these. Then
going lower and less apprehensively, he saw the slender figure of the
Wind-Vane keeper's crow's nest shining golden in the sunlight and
growing smaller every moment. As his eye fell with more confidence now,
there came a blue line of hills, and then London, already to leeward, an
intricate space of roofing. Its near edge came sharp and clear, and
banished his last apprehensions in a shock of surprise. For the boundary
of London was like a wall, like a cliff, a steep fall of three or four
hundred feet, a frontage broken only by terraces here and there, a
complex decorative facade.

That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge of
suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of the
nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it here but a
waste of ruins, variegated and dense with thickets of the heterogeneous
growths that had once