But the hyperman did not relax his vigilance for an instant as the vast, vague bulk of the flier hovered in the air beside their elevator. A port opened, a short gangplank shot out, and under the urge of the punishing trident the two human beings stepped aboard. A silent flurry ensued among the weird crew of the vessel as its huge volume sank downward under the unheard-of mass of the two captives, but no opportunity was afforded for escape—the gripping trident did not relax, and at last the amazed officers succeeded in driving their motors sufficiently to lift the prodigious load into the air of the hyperplanet.
"Take a good, long look around, Peg, so that you can help find our way back," Seaton directed, and pointed out through the peculiarly transparent wall of their conveyance. "See those three peaks over there, the only hills in sight? Our course is about twelve or fifteen degrees off the line of the right-hand two—and there's something that looks like a river down below us. The bend there is just about on line—see anything to mark it by?"
"Well, there's a funny-looking island, kind of heart-shaped, with a reddish-colored spire of rock—see it?"
"Fine—we ought to be able to recognize that. Bend, heart-island, red obelisk on what we'll call the upstream end. Now from here, what? Oh, we're turning—going upstream. Fine business! Now we'll have to notice when and where we leave this river, lake, or whatever it is."
They did not, however, leave the course of the water. For hundreds of miles, apparently, it was almost perfectly straight, and for hours the airship of the hypermen bored through the air only a few hundred feet above its gleaming surface. Faster and faster the hypership flew onward, until it became a whistling, yelling projectile, tearing its way at a terrific but constant velocity through the complaining air.
But while that which was beneath them was apparently the fourth dimensional counterpart of an Earthly canal, neither water nor landscape was in any sense familiar. No sun was visible, nor moon, nor the tiniest twinkling star. Where should be the heavens there was merely a void of utter, absolute black, appalling in its uncompromising profundity. Indeed, the Terrestrials would have thought themselves blind were it not for the forbidding, Luciferean vegetation which, self-luminous with a ghastly bluish-violet pseudo-light, extended outward—flat—in every direction to infinity.
"What's the matter with it, Dick?" demanded Margaret, shivering. "It's horrible, awful, unsettling. Surely anything that is actually seen must be capable of description? But this—" Her voice died away.
"Ordinarily, three-dimensionally, yes; but this, no," Seaton assured her. "Remember that our brains and eyes, now really pseudo-fourth-dimensional, are capable of seeing those things as they actually are; but that our entities—intelligences—whatever you like—are still three-dimensional and can neither comprehend nor describe them. We can grasp them only very roughly by transposing them into our own three-dimensional concepts, and that is a poor subterfuge that fails entirely to convey even an approximate idea. As for that horizon—or lack of it—it simply means that this planet is so big that it looks flat. Maybe it is flat in the fourth dimension—I don't know!"
Both fell silent, staring at the weird terrain over which they were being borne at such an insane pace. Along its right line above that straight watercourse sped the airship, a shrieking arrow; and to the right of the observers and to left of them spread, as far as the eye could reach, a flatly unbroken expanse of the ghostly, livid, weirdly self-luminous vegetation of the unknowable hyperworld. And, slinking, leaping, or perchance flying between and among the boles and stalks of the rank forest growth could be glimpsed fleeting monstrous forms of animal life.