feet or more sheer below him was one of the big

windvanes of south-west London, and beyond it the
southernmost flying stage crowded with little black dots.

These things seemed to be falling away from him.
For a second he had an impulse to pursue the earth.

He set his teeth, he lifted his eyes by a muscular effort,
and the moment of panic passed.

He remained for a space with his teeth set hard, his
eyes staring into the sky. Throb, throb, throb--beat,

went the engine; throb, throb, throb,--beat.
He gripped his bars tightly, glanced at the aeronaut,

and saw a smile upon his sun-tanned face. He smiled
in return--perhaps a little artificially. "A little

strange at first," he shouted before he recalled his
dignity. But he dared not look down again for some

time. He stared over the aeronaut's head to where a
rim of vague blue horizon crept up the sky. For a

little while he could' not banish the thought of possible
accidents from his mind. Throb, throb, throb--beat;

suppose some trivial screw went wrong in that
supporting engine! Suppose--! He made a grim

effort to dismiss all such suppositions. After a while
they did at least abandon the foreground of his

thoughts. And up he went steadily, higher and higher
into the clear air.

Once the mental shock of moving unsupported
through the air was over, his sensations ceased to be

unpleasant, became very speedily pleasurable. He had
been warned of air sickness. But he found the

pulsating movement of the aeropile as it drove up the faint
south-west breeze was very little in excess of the

pitching of a boat head on to broad rollers in a moderate
gale, and he was constitutionally a good sailor. And

the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they
ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration.

He looked up and saw the blue sky above
fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came cautiously

down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of
white birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space

he watched these. Then going lower and less apprehensively,
he saw the slender figure of the Wind-Vane

keeper's crow's nest shining golden in the sunlight and
growing smaller every moment. As his eye fell with

more confidence now, there came a blue line of hills,
and then London, already to leeward, an intricate

space of roofing. Its near edge came sharp and clear,
and banished his last apprehensions in a shock of surprise.

For the boundary of London was like a wall,
like a cliff, a steep fall of three or four hundred feet, a

frontage broken only by terraces here and there, a
complex decorative facade.

That gradual passage of town into country through
an extensivesponge of suburbs, which was so

characteristic a feature of the great cities of the nineteenth
century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it

but a waste of ruins here, variegated and dense with
thickets of the heterogeneous growths that had once

adorned the gardens of the belt, interspersed among
levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant

stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread
among the vestiges of houses. But for the most part

the reefs and skerries of ruins, the wreckage of
suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer

islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and
brown, abandoned indeed by the inhabitants years

since, but too substantial, it seemed', to be cleared out
of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms

of the time.
The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed

amidst the countless cells of crumbling house walls,
and broke along the foot of the city wall in a surf of

bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and tall grasses.
Here and there gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst

the puny remains of Victorian times, and cable ways
slanted to them from the city. That winter day they

seemed deserted. Deserted, too, were the artificial
gardens among the ruins. The city limits were indeed

as sharply defined as in the ancient days when the
gates were shut at nightfall and the robber foreman

prowled to the very walls. A huge semi-circular throat
poured out a vigoroustraffic upon the Eadhamite

Bath Road. So the first prospect of the world beyond
the city flashed on Graham, and dwindled. And when

at last he could look vertically downward again, he
saw below him the vegetable fields of the Thames

valley -- innumerable minute oblongs of ruddy brown,
intersected by shining threads, the sewage ditches.

His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of
intoxication. He found himself drawing deep breaths

of air, laughing aloud, desiring to shout. After a time
that desire became too strong for him, and he shouted.

The machine had now risen as high as was customary
with aeropiles, and they began to curve about

towards the south. Steering, Graham perceived, was
effected by the opening or closing of one or two thin

strips of membrane in one or other of the otherwise
rigid wings, and by the movement of the whole engine

backward or forward along its supports. The
aeronaut set the engine gliding slowly 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 swiftlynorthward 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,