This game was the consummation of the old yearning which, in days gone by, had impelled him to draw lines upon a sheet of paper. Where before, miserably and inadequately, tormented by a sense of impotence, he had drawn with a pencil lines upon paper, he now drew, with his whole gleaming white body, stupendous lines of beauty upon the blue of the sky.
He liked this. He sensed his evolution. He seemed to have within his brain a delicate instrument that recorded the movements of his body. As he cut through the azure, each flown line was deposited within him in a record of beauty. He flew from peak to peak, in lean, sizzling white lines; in shooting diagonals; in gentle floating curves; in zig-zags as of lightning; in rising and drooping lines that hoped and despaired; in soarings that aspired and broke; in arabesques that laughed; in gothic arches that prayed; in large undulations that wept. Sometimes he drew whole edifices—fairy castles, domes, towers, spires—which, once created, went floating off forever on the blue, freighted with their fantastic inhabitants, invisible, impalpable, and imperishable. And always within him was the record of the created thing, the record of created beauty, etched forever in the inner chamber of his soul.
Sometimes he played with his shadow; he tried to lose it. With a sudden bound that was meant to take it unaware, he was off, along the crest, at vertiginous speed. He went on thus, mile after mile; mile after mile, razing the peaks, he passed along the crest like a white thunderbolt, his wings a blur, his body streaming behind like an arrow. His head struck the air, broke it, parted it; it slid along his flanks in a caress that penetrated to his heart. But always beneath him, like a menace in water-depths, springing from peak to peak in huge flaccid leaps, stubborn and black his shadow followed him.
Of all the lines he knew, however, the one that he loved best was the one he drew when returning to the cabin at sunset. He would come to the meadow from the mountains at a high altitude, and then, placing himself carefully above it, he would fold his wings and drop.
He shot down like an arrow, in a long palpitant line, and then, two hundred yards from the sward, opened his wings in an explosion of fluffy whiteness.
Out of this line he obtained a profound sensation of beauty, of beauty in simplicity. It was as though he had drawn a long, slender stalk that opened in a white chalice; as though he had planted a flower, a cosmic flower, there in the bosom of the sky.
In the evening, after his meal and his pipe, he winged away to a last adventure which was as a prayer. Leaving the warm glow of his camp-fire, he soared upward into the violet night. The earth fell away beneath him, a blue blur, a shadow, till finally the shadow itself whelmed in nocturnal profundities, and of the earth there remained nothing but the little fire, the little fire gleaming red in the clearing. He rose. The night accepted him with silence and solemnity, in a velvety envelopment. He rose. The stars, at first, were all above him; gradually new cohorts of them appeared to his right and his left, on all sides; and finally, his fire, down in the clearing, itself become a star, closed a perfect sphere. He was the center of a universe of stars; the soft beating of his wings was as the hushed tolling of their eternities; the rustle of his wings the crackling of their flames. They moved as he moved; always their center, he could not approach them. And thus encircled, sometimes bewildered, he lost his way. He forgot which star was his; seized with sudden fright, he winged one way and another in mad dashes toward cold orbs which fled him.
But always, finally remembering, he could find his way merely by folding his wings.
He folded his wings, and immediately, of all the stars the little winking red one came rushing to him while the others slid by. It came rushing to him fiercely, with a sort of jealous and almost ludicrous haste, its face red with effort. And with it came the earth, a shadow, a fragrance; its warm, sweet breath fanned his cheek. Spreading largely his wings, he lit softly upon the meadow-grass, by the little fire, by the cabin, home for the night.