As trembling thus they lay, I get another impress of them which suddenly takes definite form. The solution is present. The father and mother, before mysterious, are also present. What is quite astonishing, these two are one human being. Uncanny sense gives way to delight at the vision of strength and dignity, so masculine; enhanced by grace and tenderness, so feminine.
I feel to clap my hands, but the inky blackness is coming down so fast I look to it. Wavering white spots are on it; reflections of the white cliffs below. The forks of the rod are plain and take on a familiar contour. Contour of the Milky Way. Is that a mirage of this rod on night sky?
The cloud falls and fells Savant too, nearly breaking the globe, as it splashes upon the nearest white cliff. The air now clears and cools as the deposit whitens, emitting a familiar odor. What! wax dropped out of the moon?
The tots arise and fly with gauzy robes to the cliffside and clamber excitedly about. Savant arises and enters the globe, proceeding to steer that way.
As the moon takes a smiling adieu I turn my attention again to it. I hunt some before I find a faint line, far away attached to the earth-rim, obviously its fixture. Simple but inexplicable in action. Though an electric connection in the rim may turn the earth-crust it would not also turn the moon, as the latter’s motion is monthly, not daily.
Unable to solve this I complete my former broken discovery that the constructions on it are telescopes. Mining, maybe. Informing its people of the earth and how to get there.
Approaching the cliff a digging is heard inside. Then breaks out a waxen aperture, (closed by the splash) and out peeps a tiny head. We follow the rest, unseen, into the inner court of their mountain lodge.
Wax-carved alcoves, cloud styles, line a large area open in the center thinly to the sky. In one a tiny table holds tiny plates of brittle make. In them, what? A giant mosquito trapped in the outer wax, its denuded wings wrapping the imp robbers. Another alcove in high cloud has a choir, lace draped and seated. I recollect the mist people.
In the center of the sward plaza, or esplanade, is a circular fountain, enclosing within its circular wall of water a dell or green glen. Covering our top, we steer through the fountain side and to it. Discovering ourselves to the others, who scurry angrily behind us, we descend the dell, sloping down like a funnel, to find it shortly cut off. But lower down—ground again. While gazing at the latter a sensation strangely affects me, that it is moving——moving slowly by.
What is it? In the fixture—lubricated by the fountain in each white cliff (cooling the wax), moving as does the earth-crust. We are both lost in study.