My line of flight was about parallel with the surface as I came into the upper air.  The temperature of sphere began to rise forthwith.  I knew it behoved me to drop at once.  Far below me, in a darkling twilight, stretched a great expanse of sea.  I opened every window I could, and fell—­out of sunshine into evening, and out of evening into night.  Vaster grew the earth and vaster, swallowing up the stars, and the silvery translucent starlit veil of cloud it wore spread out to catch me.  At last the world seemed no longer a sphere but flat, and then concave.  It was no longer a planet in the sky, but the world of Man.  I shut all but an inch or so of earthward window, and dropped with a slackening velocity.  The broadening water, now so near that I could see the dark glitter of the waves, rushed up to meet me.  The sphere became very hot.  I snapped the last strip of window, and sat scowling and biting my knuckles, waiting for the impact....

The sphere hit the water with a huge splash:  it must have sent it fathoms high.  At the splash I flung the Cavorite shutters open.  Down I went, but slower and slower, and then I felt the sphere pressing against my feet, and so drove up again as a bubble drives.  And at the last I was floating and rocking upon the surface of the sea, and my journey in space was at an end.

The night was dark and overcast.  Two yellow pinpoints far away showed the passing of a ship, and nearer was a red glare that came and went.  Had not the electricity of my glow-lamp exhausted itself, I could have got picked up that night.  In spite of the inordinate fatigue I was beginning to feel, I was excited now, and for a time hopeful, in a feverish, impatient way, that so my travelling might end.

But at last I ceased to move about, and sat, wrists on knees, staring at a distant red light.  It swayed up and down, rocking, rocking.  My excitement passed.  I realised I had yet to spend another night at least in the sphere.  I perceived myself infinitely heavy and fatigued.  And so I fell asleep.

A change in my rhythmic motion awakened me.  I peered through the refracting glass, and saw that I had come aground upon a huge shallow of sand.  Far away I seemed to see houses and trees, and seaward a curve, vague distortion of a ship hung between sea and sky.

I stood up and staggered.  My one desire was to emerge.  The manhole was upward, and I wrestled with the screw.  Slowly I opened the manhole.  At last the air was singing in again as once it had sung out.  But this time I did not wait until the pressure was adjusted.  In another moment I had the weight of the window on my hands, and I was open, wide open, to the old familiar sky of earth.

The air hit me on the chest so that I gasped.  I dropped the glass screw.  I cried out, put my hands to my chest, and sat down.  For a time I was in pain.  Then I took deep breaths.  At last I could rise and move about again.