The Other Picture Was A Silhouette Of The City's Flank, Mysterious As A
Line Of Unexplored Cliffs, Under A Sky Crimson - Barred From The Zenith
To The Ground, Where It Lay, Pale Emerald Behind The Uneven Ramparts.
As
our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the rails glowed dull red,
I caught the deep surge of it, and seven miles across the purple levels
saw the low, restless aurora of its lights.
It is rather an awesome
thing to listen to a vanguard of civilisation talking to itself in the
night in the same tone as a thousand-year-old city.
All the country hereabouts is riddled with railways for business and
pleasure undreamed of fifteen years ago, and it was a long time before
we reached the clear prairie of air and space and open land. The air is
different from any air that ever blew; the space is ampler than most
spaces, because it runs back to the unhampered Pole, and the open land
keeps the secret of its magic as closely as the sea or the desert.
People here do not stumble against each other around corners, but see
largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to
avoid, and they shape their path accordingly across the waves, and
troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans of the land.
When mere space and the stoop of the high sky begin to overwhelm, earth
provides little ponds and lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where
people can step down out of the floods of air, and delight themselves
with small and known distances.
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