When I came to the crest and looked over, I saw another valley before me, deeper than the first. The hill rolled away, down and down for miles, to a long, wide plain. More hills rose from the plain on every side, as simply as if they had been built there by the hand of some gigantic child playing in a wilderness of sand. And the river, coming around the base of the hill on which I was standing, but several miles away, swept out upon a great aqueduct of stone, hundreds of feet high, which crossed the plain through its very center, a straight line of breath-taking beauty, and disappeared far away into the pass between two mountains. The whole scene was too perfect to be wholly natural.
At the center of the plain stood a tall, white building. Even in the distance from which I viewed it, it looked massive—larger than any skyscraper I had ever seen. But it was delicately and intricately designed, terraced much as most modern office buildings in New York are terraced, but more elaborately. Its base stood about the aqueduct, which passed through it, and it swept up magnificently to a slender peak almost level with the crest of the hill where I was standing. It was the only building in sight.
I don't know how long I stood there, admiring the clean sweep and vastness of the scene, before I saw something rise sharply, with a flashing of bright wings, from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of them came toward my hill.
It was only a few moments before the thing sped up to me and swooped down as I waved my arms. It was, of course, a machine, slender and long, with wide arching wings. It seemed almost light enough to float. It had a deck, shielded from the wind by a shimmering transparent thing like a thin wire screen, and under the deck a cabin made, it seemed, of glass. A man and a woman stood on the deck, the woman handling the controls. They were both dressed much like myself.
The machine came to rest on the hill near me. I stepped forward, and the man leaped down to meet me. His first greeting was curious.
"So you are here," he said. His voice was small but cool, penetrating and metallic. I thought of fine steel wires. And, when I replied, my own voice had something of the same quality.
"Were you expecting me?" I said. He nodded, shaking my hand briefly and quietly.
"We know all about you," he answered. I was pleased—it made things simpler—but I wanted to ask him who I was. I didn't remember anything up to the moment of my awakening on the other side of the hill. Instead, I asked him: