In the beginning, I know there was nothing more unusual in the things
about me than a motor-car standing by the entrance to a dull, palatial,
and expensive hotel on the Devon coast. The time was near midnight. The
world was only the hotel lights and the moan of the sea. I had been to
an enthusiastic political meeting; so my complete adhesion, at first,
to common clay, is proved. There was another town, thirty miles away in
the dark of the moors, and thither would we go, if it could be done. I
did not think it could, though I did not think much about it, being too
tired.
Standing near the car, which had a nose like a torpedo, was a young
man; what resembled a young man. I must be careful, for I had never
seen the fellow by daylight, and am now uncertain whether or not he
could be seen by daylight. He was pulling on great fur gloves and,
speaking quietly with suspicious modesty, he stinted nothing of his
ability to get to any old place in these islands before the next
dawn. He spoke with the calm certitude of a god who takes the sunward
hemisphere of this earth in one glance, and takes that side of it
which is lost to mortals sleeping there at night as but a span of his
thumb in the stars.
I asked him if he had ever been on this road before, for a doubt of
the omnipresence of this dubious man prompted me. I knew what hills
and bad places, even by day, lay between me and the town where I fain
would be. “I expect so,” he murmured, as though disguising his voice;
“I expect so, some time or another.” The matter then dropped. I asked
no more questions. There were no more to ask, except concerning those
exactions of time and space which mortals never question. With the soft
indifference of the sleepy mind, I was willing to believe that some
time or another, in eternity, the timeless being beside me had included
in his planetary orbits this bit of country. His wheels had taken this
ugly length of night road, which awed a pedestrian mortal like me, in a
single revolution, while belated wayfarers there, horror-stricken, had
listened open-mouthed (backs up against the hedge-banks) to the swift
diminuendo of earthquake and eclipse.
Yet I lifted my tired eyes for a glance at this young man to catch, if
it were there, an unguarded hint of his inhuman origin. There was but a
half-smile on his lean face, which should have warned me, but did not.
He stood by the black bulk of his impassive chariot. A tremor did come
over me; and so, while my homely feet were still planted indubitably on
good mother earth, I looked about me there for the last time. Nothing
stirred. There was nothing unusual; no omen, no portent. Earth was
deeply embedded and asleep in night. It seemed so certain (and here
I turned to my charioteer again to see his face) that, from where I
stood, the other town was as sundered from me as one of the asteroids.
Its glint was too remote in the void to be seen. Suddenly then I became
awake and afraid, and would have pushed the Tempter from me, saying
that I’d find a bed where I was for the night. But I was given no time
to speak.
“Get in,” said the uncertain smile; and I dropped into the soft cloud
of his immaterial car. What had only looked like a dim carriage
instantly shook with the suppressed dynamics of many horses, and shot a
vast ray into the night, as might have been expected from a comet. The
smile slipped in beside me. He moved his hand swiftly. We got off the
earth.
If any abroad there at that late hour saw a meteor falling, tail first,
athwart the North Devon hills, they would have been surprised to know
there was one mortal man astride that flying light, conscious, too,
of his mortality, and wondering how deep his bones would be found
when the aerolite was dug out afterwards by the curious. From my
stellar seat--we flew low down over the earth--what I saw on my right
hand was the huge shadow of a hill, with the thin bright rind of the
new moon just above it. Very little below us was the shine of our
comet, revealing a pale road pouring past, a road which made flying
leaps upward at us, but never touched us. There was also a luminous,
pale-green haze, streaming in the wind which roared past. I think it
was hedges. It went by in never-ceasing undulations. We were always
about to tear through it, but miraculously it avoided us. The paring
of moon remained above the high shadow on the right. Sometimes the
transparent apparitions of trees shaped before us; we were skimming the
dark planet too close. Sometimes we were so low in our flight that we
had to dive, roaring, under their lower ghostly branches, and soared
when through them into the silence of the outer dark again.
Once we alighted on earth, just brushing it in a swoop on the upslope
of a hill, and then rolled up gently in a great light. It was then
that, instead of flying luminous streaks, I could see stones and
clods, rooted trees and hedges growing where they stood, and they all
looked like handpainted scenery by limelight. We reached the hill-top,
the smile beside me gave a demoniac hoot, and we shot out into space
like a projectile, falling sheer to the nether stars. My hair rose on
end in the upward rush of wind. I had had about enough of it. If we hit
another body in the sky larger than ourselves....
It seems to me someone on the meteor gave a loud cry--probably it was
this deponent--for by our light I saw we were rushing at the earth
again. So close did we go that we almost struck a cluster of white
houses. It was a near thing. We missed them all, luckily, for we hit
the place at the open end of a street, and so shot through and out,
just below the roofs. I heard a scream there as the pallid walls reeled
past us. The thing beside me hooted in derision. What did that smile
care for the fears of mortals at awful portents in their village at
night?
At last I did not care, but in a mad and lawless mood, giving my soul
to anarchy, began to enjoy it. Far ahead and below us in the dark sky
there was a constant group of delicate stars, like the Pleiades, and
I noticed that they grew in brightness and increased in numbers; and
presently, beyond doubt, they were rushing at us. In a few seconds our
meteor was in the cluster of them, missing them all again--our luck was
astonishing--but before we got through them the motor stopped. There
was a policeman standing under a hotel sign, and that hotel was mine. I
got out of the car, crossed myself reverently, and turned to see what
had brought me there. But the road was empty.