When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it had fallen very far away from me.  Field and town were long since indistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merging into a uniform bright grey, broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the west of England.  For now I could see the outlines of the north of France and Ireland, and all this Island of Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or obliterated by cloud.  The sea was a dull grey, and darker than the land; and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.

All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles or so from the earth I had no thought for myself.  But now I perceived I had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt neither alarm nor pain.  All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for I had already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of man; but it troubled me not.  The sun’s rays shot through the void, powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in their course.  I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I were God.  And down below there, rushing away from me,—­countless miles in a second,—­where a little dark spot on the grey marked the position of London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poor hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned.  I felt then such release, such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known.

It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension.  Yet it was so simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the thing that was happening to me.  I had suddenly been cut adrift from matter:  all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space.  But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for matter:  where it parts from its garment of flesh, there it remains (so far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. I was not leaving the earth:  the earth was leaving me, and not only the earth but the whole solar system was streaming past.  And about me in space, invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey, there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences, things of new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange release that had suddenly come on them!