And then, settling himself once more in position, Croft cried to his men, and once more the engine roared. Briefly he glimpsed his companion's face. It was eager, expectant, in the morning light. Her breast rose and fell in a barely quickened rhythm under its covering of brown.
"Let go!"
Once more the plane advanced, jolting, tipping a little, swaying to the slight irregularities of the ground it ran ahead. Croft moved a lever. The obedient monster answered. The desert fell away beneath. Up, up, Jason of earth and Naia of Aphur, daughter of Ga, and child of Palos, swam toward a brightening sky of pink and gold. Up and up. Once more he stole a sidelong glance at his companion's face. It was lifted, tilted a little back—its blue eyes closed.
"Naia!" Croft spoke to her above the motor's roar.
She lifted her lids, met his somewhat anxious regard, and smiled. And from him she let her gaze wander over the whole vast panorama of desert and mountain and the Central Ocean, blue and green and black and gold, with a froth on the nearer waves like a fringe of white to their shadowed flanks as it caught the light, and Himyra—the red city beginning to glow as Sirius shot his shafts against its ruddy walls, and like a dull chain, supporting the red jewel of the city on the breast of Aphur, the yellow Na, outlined as far as the eye could reach by a band of shimmering green.
And suddenly her breast lifted, her lips parted, and she began to sing—to sing as she had once cried to Croft that the birds she envied sang as they rose against the morning—gladly—clearly—freely as a bird itself might sing.
So sang Naia of Aphur, between Himyra and the sun.
After that Croft taught her how to fly. Having once yielded, he could not well again refuse. And Naia had her way with him, as she had meant to do ever since she first was taken with the notion of herself controlling one of the new machines that he had made.
But the promise to teach her she exacted that same morning after they had returned to the palace. Robur ran off to tell Gaya concerning the success of the trial flight, and Naia dared Croft to bathe. Afterward he was half inclined to think she adopted the time and place to a gaining of her point. Woman she would not have been had she not realized her beauty and its appeal. But at the time he gave the matter no thought.