owly forward along its rail and
opened the valve of the leeward wing until the stem of the aeropile was
horizontal and pointing southward. And in that direction they drove with
a slight list to leeward, and with a slow alternation of movement, first
a short, sharp ascent and' then a long downward glide that was very
swift and pleasing. During these downward glides the propellor was
inactive altogether. These ascents gave Graham a glorious sense of
successful effort; the descents through the rarefied air were beyond all
experience. He wanted never to leave the upper air again.

For a time he was intent upon the minute details of the landscape that
ran swiftly northward beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him
exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once
dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from which
all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known
the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter.
He tried to make out places he had known within the hollow basin of
the world below, but at first he could distinguish no data now that the
Thames valley was left behind. Soon, however, they were driving over a
sharp chalk hill that he recognised as the Guildford Hog's Back, because
of the familiar outline of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of
the ruins of the town that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge.
And from that he made out other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes
of Aldershot, and so forth. The Downs escarpment was set with gigantic
slow-moving wind-wheels. Save where the broad Eadhamite Portsmouth
Road, thickly dotted with rushing shapes, followed the course of the old
railway, the gorge of the Wey was choked with thickets.

The whole expanse of the Downs escarpment, so far as the grey haze
permitted him to see, was set with wind-wheels to which the largest of
the city was but a younger brother. They stirred with a stately motion
before the south-west wind. And here and there were patches dotted
with the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted
shepherd made a spot of black. Then rushing under the stern of the
aeropile came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and
Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob
the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was
speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drov