lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—­possibly a far-reaching explosion—­would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions—­into the Unknown.  This possibility had occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk—­one of the risks a man has got to take!  Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light.  The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve.  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 hail-stones.  The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a 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.