un to Rodriguez and
beckon him thence: even Morano felt them calling. Rodriguez closed his
eyes. The voice and the Moorish spells made now a more haunting melody:
they were now like a golden organ on undiscoverable mountains. Fear
came on Morano at the thought: who had power to speak like this? He
grasped Rodriguez by the wrist. "Master!" he said, but at that moment
on one of those golden spells the spirit of Rodriguez drifted away from
his body, and out of the greenish light of the curious room; unhampered
by weight, or fatigue, or pain, or sleep; and it rose above the rocks
and over the mountain, an unencumbered spirit: and the spirit of Morano
followed.

The mountain dwindled at once; the Earth swept out all round them and
grew larger, and larger still, and then began to dwindle. They saw then
that they were launched upon some astounding journey. Does my reader
wonder they saw when they had no eyes? They saw as they had never seen
before, with sight beyond what they had ever thought to be possible.
Our eyes gather in light, and with the little rays of light that they
bring us we gather a few images of things as we suppose them to be.
Pardon me, reader, if I call them things as we suppose them to be; call
them by all means Things As They Really Are, if you wish. These images
then, this tiny little brainful that we gather from the immensities,
are all brought in by our eyesight upside-down, and the brain corrects
them again; and so, and so we know something. An oculist will tell you
how it all works. He may admit it is all a little clumsy, or for the
dignity of his profession he may say it is not at all. But be this as
it may, our eyes are but barriers between us and the immensities. All
our five senses that grope a little here and touch a little there, and
seize, and compare notes, and get a little knowledge sometimes, they
are only barriers between us and what there is to know. Rodriguez and
Morano were outside these barriers. They saw without the imperfections
of eyesight; they heard on that journey what would have deafened ears;
they went through our atmosphere unburned by speed, and were unchilled
in the bleak of the outer spaces. Thus freed of the imperfections of
the body they sped, no less upon a terrible journey, whose direction as
yet Rodriguez only began to fear.

They had seen the stars pale rapidly and then the flash of dawn. The
Sun rushed up and at once began to grow larger. Earth, with her curved
side