Evan gazed at the garden wall, gravely for more than a minute, and then he nodded without a word.

XV.  THE DREAM OF MACIAN

The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense of almost complete solitude.  They could stray up so near to the wall in an apparently unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump over it.  They would only have found the error of their calculations if they had tried to jump.

Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan MacIan was in the habit of creeping out into the garden after dark—­especially upon moonlight nights.  The moon, indeed, was for him always a positive magnet in a manner somewhat hard to explain to those of a robuster attitude.  Evidently, Apollo is to the full as poetical as Diana; but it is not a question of poetry in the matured and intellectual sense of the word.  It is a question of a certain solid and childish fancy.  The sun is in the strict and literal sense invisible; that is to say, that by our bodily eyes it cannot properly be seen.  But the moon is a much simpler thing; a naked and nursery sort of thing.  It hangs in the sky quite solid and quite silver and quite useless; it is one huge celestial snowball.  It was at least some such infantile facts and fancies which led Evan again and again during his dehumanized imprisonment to go out as if to shoot the moon.

He was out in the garden on one such luminous and ghostly night, when the steady moonshine toned down all the colours of the garden until almost the strongest tints to be seen were the strong soft blue of the sky and the large lemon moon.  He was walking with his face turned up to it in that rather half-witted fashion which might have excused the error of his keepers; and as he gazed he became aware of something little and lustrous flying close to the lustrous orb, like a bright chip knocked off the moon.  At first he thought it was a mere sparkle or refraction in his own eyesight; he blinked and cleared his eyes.  Then he thought it was a falling star; only it did not fall.  It jerked awkwardly up and down in a way unknown among meteors and strangely reminiscent of the works of man.  The next moment the thing drove right across the moon, and from being silver upon blue, suddenly became black upon silver; then although it passed the field of light in a flash its outline was unmistakable though eccentric.  It was a flying ship.

The vessel took one long and sweeping curve across the sky and came nearer and nearer to MacIan, like a steam-engine coming round a bend.  It was of pure white steel, and in the moon it gleamed like the armour of Sir Galahad.  The simile of such virginity is not inappropriate; for, as it grew larger and larger and lower and lower, Evan saw that the only figure in it was robed in white from head to foot and crowned with snow-white hair, on which the moonshine lay like a benediction.  The figure stood so still that he could easily have supposed it to be a statue.  Indeed, he thought it was until it spoke.