“Send him to the Moon,” they cried with one voice.
“Mercy, gentlemen, mercy.”
“Fiddlesticks! To Moonland with him,” answered the sprite. “There is lots of room for him to fossick there. Eh, Lunar?”
Over that terrible void, near where they held him, our hero observed a strange object floating with a gentle, oscillating motion, as a feather floats in space. In appearance, it was like a gigantic [[202]]umbrella inverted, with a hole cut in the centre. To the ends of the ribs cords of gossamer were fastened which stretched upward to a car in the shape of a star, the points expanded like huge wings. The nature of this material, or by what process this curious vehicle had been manufactured, the unfortunate shepherd had neither power nor leisure at that moment to examine, for the ancient fay had no sooner spoken than Dusk and his companion seized hold of him, like a pair of vultures, and flew upward with him in the car of the parachute.
“Good-bye, Lunar, let me know when you arrive,” cried some of the fairies.
“Slide a message down a moonbeam,” responded others.
“Or a rainbow, or the tail of a comet.” And while the mountain sprites stood and jeered, the quaint machine suddenly shot down the empty space with the velocity of a cannon-ball.
Who shall describe the sensation of the poor mortal, as he felt himself falling—falling down—down, a blind mass, through the darkened air? Those who have fallen, or have leaped even from a moderate height, can have no conception of the frenzied terror that took possession of him for a moment. Yet it was only for a moment. Strange [[203]]to say, he did not lose his presence of mind, and his fear left him as suddenly as it had fallen upon him. From a bewildering chaos of thought in the captive’s mind curiosity became paramount to all else. Amid the murky blackness around and about there was very little to examine, but the shepherd thrust his head through the gossamer network of the machine and gazed below. Far, far away in the profound depths beneath them, he saw a vast disc of soft light which threw its rays upward, and enabled him to discern that the abyss through which they were descending appeared like a hollow cone, the neck of which began in the mountain, and like an eddying circle in the water, gradually became wider and wider as they advanced.
The progress of the parachute was so swift that they rapidly emerged into the focus of the light—the wide mouth of the cone receding to a faint, dark circle on the pale horizon in the space of a few seconds. It was astounding how wondrous soft and beautiful the shimmering glow of light in this new region burst upon the mortal’s vision. He had witnessed many lovely changes from the lofty peaks of the New South Wales Alps, but Dame Nature had never presented herself to his eyes in such a garb before. Not the glaring, hot, [[204]]dazzling rays of the summer sun here, but rather a gentle, subdued, dreamy refulgence, without the ghost of a shadow or shade of variation upon anything.
Above, below, one universal, pale, liquid glimmer, devoid of vapour. Distant mountains, peaked and gabled like an iceberg, appeared to view, and hills and valleys, with deep ruts and chasms, forming an amphitheatre of vast dimensions, became more clear to the sight every moment. Everything seemed mixed up and confounded by the uniformity of colour. Rocks, valleys, and streams presented a weird and wonderful aspect under new conditions where, like Hoffmann’s shadowless man, every object was lighted up on all sides, equally, in the absence of a central point. Scorched and charred and burnt, there was not a sign of a tree or a shrub on the face of the whole landscape. Scoriæ and dross and pumice-stone—nothing else, save the waters that lay bathed in luminous silvery grey.