al navigation, and accordingly drove
the _Aeropher_ at a speed of eighty miles an hour.

The captain explained to me that he was using the wheels simply to
lift the ship over the mountains. Once over these the wheels that were
being used to lift the ship would thus propel her, when her normal
speed of two hundred miles an hour would be reached.

Lyone was in a particularly happy mood. "I like aerial travelling so
much," said she, "because it is the nearest mechanical approach to the
nature of the soul."

"What relation to the soul can the ship possibly possess?" I inquired.

"Why, don't you see," said she, "that our travelling approaches nearer
to that of the spiritual state than any other mode? We can at will
sweep up into heaven or descend to earth. We are independent of
obstacles. Rivers and roads, mountains and seas have no terrors for
us. Then the infinite daring of it all--oh! it is to me delightful."

Higher and yet higher mounted the ship up the steeps of the continent
until we plunged into a grisly pass. On either side the huge shoulders
of the mountains lifted up forests of pines and cedars, whose colossal
trunks seemed the gateways of a new world. The ship indeed possessed
some of the attributes of a soul. It could plunge us into sublimity or
death, lift up to the very sun itself, or, like a disembodied soul,
skim the surface of the earth.

The mountains once crossed, we swept down their declivities toward the
prairies with tremendous speed. The propellers seemed powerful enough
to control the ship in the fiercest storm. The inner world lay spread
out beneath us like a map in relief. There was a strange absence of
shadow caused by a perpendicular sun that realized the climate of
Dante,

"A land whereon no shadow falls."

Yet as the _Aeropher_ swept onward her shadow could be seen drifting
over cornfields, miles of rustling wheat and pastures where the cattle
started and fled from the apparition in the sky.

We were admiring the beauty of the panorama beneath, when the sky
became suddenly overcast with clouds, obscuring the light of the sun.
This was so unexpected an occurrence that Lyone and myself looked at
each other in alarm.

Captain Lavornal exclaimed: "Your holiness, I apprehend these clouds
are the couriers of a hurricane!"

"Do you mean that we shall be overtaken by the storm?" asked Lyone.

"Most certainly," said the captain, "and I tremble lest anything
should happen to your holi