In all this it was only the fairy-like women who had sailed and shone. Now there came hundreds of men, dark-robed, copying Regan’s taste in dress, aware that there was a splendor of color to lighten to glory any darkness in the splotches of radiance on their cloaking wings.
They bore a slight wicker car, cushioned with crimson and covered with pendants of glass. They carried Regan and Rondah, seated in this car, above the summit of the loftiest peak.
Over a vast surface Rondah looked upon moving black wings, hiding all else. She was awed with the exhibition of their immense strength, as she saw it thus exhibited in one huge, moving mass.
“I can see nothing but a carpet of wings,” she whispered to Regan; “but, if they would rise, I could see the whole star.”
In a few moments they did so. They swept in a canopy above the car, and like a little ball the star slept beneath them. In the midnight whiteness of the Earth moon and its satellite there lay its islanded seas, its banding continent, the fiery south, the arctic north, the gray moonlit forests, the white moonlit mountains, the mist-pale vales, silver streams, diamond lakes.
“Earth was not so fair,” said Rondah. “Then Earth was ponderous; no man could own all Earth; it was beyond one man in its expanse of endless miles. This, our world, Regan, is within human comprehension, within the grasp of one man’s mind, under the sway of one man’s sceptre.”
“You appreciate the kingdom,” said Regan.
He had feared a little that Rondah, with her tastes moulded by custom of Earth’s poverty, would not understand what an achievement was the successful reaching and the continued ruling of the star.
She knew it all.
Rondah’s pleased laugh, like the joyous laugh of a careless child, rang out in her delight, as she contemplated it, and the murmur of the bird men’s whisper of admiration sounded like the sudden wakening of a breeze in the trees, for the bird women did not laugh.