Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/269

 "Thunderbolts!" said Normantowers contemptuously. "What can those fools do but go about flinging fireworks?"

"Quite so," replied Eden; "but I'm afraid by this time they are flinging fireworks into a powder-magazine."

He continued to gaze into the sky with screwed-up eyes, though the object had become invisible.

If his eye could really have followed the thing after which he gazed, he would have been surprised; if his unfathomable scepticism was still capable of surprise. It passed over woods and meadows like a sunset cloud towards the sunset, or a little to the north-west of it, like the fairy castle that was west of the moon. It left behind the green orchards and the red towers of Hereford and passed into bare places whose towers are mightier than any made by man, where they buttress the mighty wall of Wales. Far away in this wilderness of columned cliffs and clefts it found a cleft or hollow, along the floor of which ran a dark line that might have been a black river running through a rocky valley. But it was in fact a crack opening below into another abyss. The strange flying-ship followed the course of the winding fissure till it came to a place where the crack opened