The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together.
“Yes!� he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!�
“Come back to what word?� asked his friend.
“‘Impossible,’� answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?�
“I see what he has done all right,� answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I see what you are driving at.�
“What we have seen is another impossible thing,� said Owen Hood; “a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly.�
“It’s pretty extraordinary,� admitted Crane, “but it’s not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.�
And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill.
In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.
“The thing I can’t understand,� he said abruptly, “is how Hilary managed to do all that by himself.�