upset my nerves. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust
of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I
lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over,
and I was flung headlong through the air.
There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was
sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was
gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a
garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their
mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating
of the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a little cloud
over the machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I
was wet to the skin. Fine hospitality, said I, to a man who has
travelled innumerable years to see you.
Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and
looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white
stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy
downpour. But all else of the world was invisible.
My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew
thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for
a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in
shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being
carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to
hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick
with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless
eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the
lips. It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant
suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space half a
minute, perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as
the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from
it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and
that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun.
I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity
of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy
curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
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