I was in mid-air.  Far below was the West End of London, receding rapidly,—­for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward,—­and as it receded, passing westward like a panorama.  I could see, through the faint haze of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways, stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares, and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric.  But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin, far away and faint with haze.  Up I rushed.  And at first I had not the faintest conception what this headlong rush upward could mean.

Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider, and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and more hazy and pale and indistinct, a luminous grey was mingled more and more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows; and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more dazzlingly white.  Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily through the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had ever beheld.  And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable host broke out upon the sky:  more stars than anyone has ever seen from the face of the earth.  For the blueness of the sky in the light of the sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly:  there is diffused light even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars by day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun.  But now I saw things—­I know not how; assuredly with no mortal eyes—­and that defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer.  The sun was incredibly strange and wonderful.  The body of it was a disc of blinding white light:  not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire.  And shooting half-way across the heavens from either side of it and brighter than the Milky Way, were two pinions of silver white, making it look more like those winged globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can remember upon earth.  These I knew for the solar corona, though I had never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly life.