“Oh! get on,” cried Lucifer, boisterously.

“Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run into something.  I thought you wouldn’t mind my mentioning it, but it’s running into something now.”

Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel.  For the last ten minutes they had been shooting downwards into great cracks and caverns of cloud.  Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud.  The Professor’s eyes were blazing like a maniac’s.

“It is a new world,” he cried, with a dreadful mirth.  “It is a new planet and it shall bear my name.  This star and not that other vulgar one shall be ‘Lucifer, sun of the morning.’  Here we will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods.  Here man shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel—­here the intellect——­”

“There seems,” said Michael, timidly, “to be something sticking up in the middle of it.”

“So there is,” said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement.  “What can it be?  It might of course be merely a——­”

Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung up his arms like a lost spirit.  The monk took the helm in a tired way; he did not seem much astonished for he came from an ignorant part of the world in which it is not uncommon for lost spirits to shriek when they see the curious shape which the Professor had just seen on the top of the mysterious ball, but he took the helm only just in time, and by driving it hard to the left he prevented the flying ship from smashing into St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding on a leaden sea.  As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert.  Hence it gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without resistance.  There was, as it were, a deadly shock in the fact that there was no shock.  It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so much butter.  But sensations awaited them which were much stranger than those of sinking through the solid earth.  For a moment their eyes and nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness warmed into a kind of brown fog.  And far, far below them the brown fog fell until it warmed into fire.  Through the dense London atmosphere they could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath them in squares and oblongs of fire.  The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames; or you might