"Perhaps, but we mustn't forget what happened on Mars, Madonna mia. Still, there's one thing, we haven't been tackled by any aerial fleets yet."
"I don't think the people here want air-ships. They can fly themselves. Look! there are a lot of them coming to meet us. That was a rather wicked remark of yours, Lenox, about the half-way house to heaven; but those certainly do look something like angels."
As Zaidie said this, after a somewhat lengthy pause, during which the Astronef had descended to within a few hundred feet of the mountain-spur, she handed her field-glasses to her husband, and pointed downwards towards an island which lay a couple or miles or so off the end of the spur.
He put the glasses to his eyes, and took a long look through them. Moving them slowly up and down, and from side to side, he saw hundreds of winged figures rising from the island and floating towards them.
"You were right, dear," he said, without taking the glass from his eyes, "and so was I. If those aren't angels, they're certainly something like men, and, I suppose, women too who can fly. We may as well stop here and wait for them. I wonder what sort of an animal they take the Astronef for."
He sent a message down the tube to Murgatroyd and gave a turn and a half to the steering-wheel. The propellers slowed down and the Astronef dropped with a hardly-perceptible shock in the midst of a little plateau covered with a thick, soft moss of a pale yellowish green, and fringed by a belt of trees which seemed to be over three hundred feet high, and whose foliage was a deep golden bronze.
They had scarcely landed before the flying figures reappeared over the tree tops and swept downwards in long spiral curves towards the Astronef.
"If they're not angels, they're very like them," said Zaidie, putting down her glasses.
"There's one thing, they fly a lot better than the old masters' angels or Doré's could have done, because they have tails—or at least something that seems to serve the same purpose, and yet they haven't got feathers."
"Yes, they have, at least round the edges of their wings or whatever they are, and they've got clothes, too, silk tunics or something of that sort—and there are men and women."