“It’s only levitation, after all, this flying,” he exclaimed, shooting out his tongue between the words, as his habit was when excited; “and what is levitation but a power of the air? None of you can hang an orange in space for a second, with all your scientific knowledge; but the moon is always levitated perfectly. And the stars. D’you think they swing on wires? What raised the enormous stones of ancient Egypt? D’you really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? Bah! It was levitation. It was the powers of the air. Believe in those powers, and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick—true where it is, but true nowhere else. To know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether. To know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you call weight—and fly.”
“Show us, show us!” they cried, roaring with delighted laughter.
“It’s a question of belief,” he repeated, his tongue appearing and disappearing like a pointed shadow. “It’s in the heart; the power of the air gets into your whole being. Why should I show you? Why should I ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? For it is deity, I tell you, and nothing else. I know it. Follow one idea like that, as I follow my bird idea—follow it with the impetus and undeviating concentration of a projectile—and you arrive at power. You know deity—the bird idea of deity, that is. They knew that. The old Egyptians knew it.”
“Oh, show us, show us!” they shouted impatiently, wearied of his nonsense-talk. “Get up and fly! Levitate yourself, as they did! Become a star!”
Binovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen brown eyes. He rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was perched. Something about him changed. There was silence instantly.
“I will show you,” he said calmly, to their intense amazement; “not to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. For the powers of the air are with me here. I believe. And Horus, great falcon-headed symbol, is my patron god.”
The suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. There was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. He raised his arms; his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath, and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant:
“O Horus,
Bright-eyed deity of wind,
[1]Feather my soul