selected a peak some ten miles away, and shot to it in a line which
was impeccably straight. Then he repeated the flight, this time in a
slight even curve, flowing and smooth as the rise, swell, and gradual
fall of a musical chord. The next time, he flew to the peak in a zipping
parabola that was as the course of a rocket.

This game was the consummation of the old yearning which, in days gone
by, had impelled him to draw lines upon a sheet of paper. Where before,
miserably and inadequately, tormented by a sense of impotence, he had
drawn with a pencil lines upon paper, he now drew, with his whole
gleaming white body, stupendous lines of beauty upon the blue of the sky.

He liked this. He sensed his evolution. He seemed to have within his
brain a delicate instrument that recorded the movements of his body. As
he cut through the azure, each flown line was deposited within him in a
record of beauty. He flew from peak to peak, in lean, sizzling white
lines; in shooting diagonals; in gentle floating curves; in zig-zags as
of lightning; in rising and drooping lines that hoped and despaired; in
soarings that aspired and broke; in arabesques that laughed; in gothic
arches that prayed; in large undulations that wept. Sometimes he drew
whole edifices--fairy castles, domes, towers, spires--which, once
created, went floating off forever on the blue, freighted with their
fantastic inhabitants, invisible, impalpable, and imperishable. And
always within him was the record of the created thing, the record of
created beauty, etched forever in the inner chamber of his soul.

Sometimes he played with his shadow; he tried to lose it. With a sudden
bound that was meant to take it unaware, he was off, along the crest, at
vertiginous speed. He went on thus, mile after mile; mile after mile,
razing the peaks, he passed along the crest like a white thunderbolt, his
wings a blur, his body streaming behind like an arrow. His head struck
the air, broke it, parted it; it slid along his flanks in a caress that
penetrated to his heart. But always beneath him, like a menace in
water-depths, springing from peak to peak in huge flaccid leaps,
stubborn and black his shadow followed him.

Of all the lines he knew, however, the one that he loved best was the one
he drew when returning to the cabin at sunset. He would come to the
meadow from the mountains at a high altitude, and then, placing himself
carefully above it, he would fold his wings and drop.