At the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling—the noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening.
‘The crack, the crack!’ cried his guides together. ‘That’s the air rushing. It’s coming. Look out!’ They seized him by the hands.
‘But I shall never get through,’ shouted Paul, thinking of his size for the first time.
‘Yes you will,’ Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. ‘Between the sixth and seventh strokes, remember.’
The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went shrieking into the sky.
Six! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a vice.
There was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his feet.
A wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end—and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything.
‘Only just managed it,’ Nixie observed to Jonah. ‘He is rather wide, isn’t he?’
‘Everybody’s thin somewhere,’ was the reply.