as by now,
probably, in the Serpentine, and her round head was therefore disclosed,
with two stout sand-coloured plaits pursuing each other round it.

The witches faced each other for some seconds. A long way away they
could hear the spitting and crackling sound of the two broomsticks
fighting. Looking up, they could see the combatants, like black comets
in collision. Our witch, who had good sight, saw that the enemy
broomstick was upper-most, and that the writhing Harold was being shaken
like a mouse. Their bristles were interlocked. One twig floated down
between the witches, and our witch recognised it as coming from her poor
Harold's mane. As, for this purpose, she brought her eyes to her
immediate surroundings, it seemed to her suddenly that the sky was
growing larger, and then she realised that this was because their refuge
was growing smaller. The edges of the cloud were dissolving. She saw at
last her peril and her disadvantage. If Harold should be killed or
disabled she could never reach the earth again, except by means of a
fatal fall of several thousand feet. The enemy witch, with her
ingenious cloak contrivance strapped securely about her, stood a
reasonable chance of escape. But our witch was an amateur in War, she
was without support, forlornly dressed in her faithful blue serge
three-year-old, and her little squirrel tippet.

Magic, as you know, has limitations. Fire is of course a plaything in
magic hands. Water has its docile moments, the earth herself may be
tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions
to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable
Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no
power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost
between us and the moon, and all magic people know--and tremble to
know--that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may
close, and the shell of time first crack and then be crushed, and magic
be one with nothingness and death and all other delusions. This is why
magic, which treats the other elements as its servants, bows before
space, and has to call such a purely independent contrivance as a
broomstick to its help in the matter of air-travel.

The witches faced each other on their little unstable sanctuary in the
kingdom of space. Our witch felt secretly sick, and at the same time she
tore fear from her mind, and knew that death was but an impe