Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/242

 and soft carpets upon the soundproof floor. Further on will be a news-room, with a noiseless but busy tape at one corner, printing off messages from the wires by the wayside, and further still, rooms for gossip and smoking, a billiard-room, and the dining car. Behind we shall come to bedrooms, bathrooms, the hairdresser, and so forth.

"When shall we start?" I ask presently as we return, rather like bashful yokels, to the library, and the old gentleman reading the "Arabian Nights" in the arm-chair in the corner glances up at me with a sudden curiosity.

The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a pretty little lead-paned window, through which we see a village sleeping under cloudy moonlight go flashing by. Then a skylit lake, and then a string of swaying lights, gone with the leap of a camera shutter.

Two hundred miles an hour!

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths. It is perhaps terrestrial of us that we do not think of reading the Utopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. I find a bed of the simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a time thinking—quite tranquilly—of this marvellous adventure.

I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with the light out, seems ever the same place, wherever in space one may chance to be? And asleep, there is no space for us at all. I become drowsy and incoherent and metaphysical

The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car, re-echoed by the flying track, is more