With such a sky to lead him on?’”
And westward we too went on.
Marshes, wet concealed bottoms, lakes and boggy tracts diversified these uplands; and down gulches in the bold profiled bays streams poured in cascades, all rushing westward. Coming over a lower neck between the domes we came in view of a dark blue lake of water far down in a narrow amphitheater; just above it on a higher shelf was a second smaller lake. What appeared to be white gulls were sailing in circles over them. The picture was a lovely one. We clambered up its eastern wall, and, in the midst of low balsams that here interrupted the heather, and so thickly crowded together that you could walk on top of them, we looked straight into the pocket. We lay down on the short balsam trees, in a soft perfumed bed of green needles, and gazed and gazed. A strong wind blew. Far, far eastward rose that portentous bulwark of clouds and misty confusion which the Professor had called the “Perpetual Nimbus,” and which was the cosmic screen of this wonderland. Hopkins was on his back, and it was he whose cry shot a new thrill of—How shall I name it?—laughing consternation through us.
“My God,” he cried in a sort of stifled shout, “there’s a gang of the fellows we’re looking for, straight above us, in a cluster, like so many soap bubbles.”
Again his summons brought us to a concentrated attention, and sure enough, dimly separable from the air in which it floated, was a minute cloud of small balloons, and dependent from each group of three the outline of a small human figure—and all gently drifting in an upper current of air, certainly less strong than the brisk gale about us.
“Get under the trees,” whispered Goritz, “they’re coming down.”
We were quickly concealed, burrowing our way with the alertness of moles below the thatched branches, and each eagerly hunting for a spying place whence we might watch this strange argosy. Yes! They were rapidly approaching; the dangling legs, the fluttering blue and yellow tunics, confined by golden belts (!!!) were visible, curious unproportionate heads, hanging forward as if from heaviness, legs in loose trousers, and sandaled feet. Then the wind blowing about us touched them and, like a gyrating swarm of mosquitoes dispersed by a breeze, they were flung away, dancing, bobbing, hither and thither, and from them issued squealy shouts and squeaky laughter. They came together again, directed by means undiscoverable to us, though the Professor detected some waving objects in their hands, and then the crowd, perhaps twenty, as if suddenly apprized of their desired position, dropped like so many unsupported bodies straight into the deep pocket of the little lake we had just been admiring.
The wind did not drift them, the balloons seemed collapsible, but, to our amazement, they expanded again, checking the fall. In fact, unless our eyes deceived us, and we all agreed as to the main point, the balloons inflated and shrank, somehow at the will of these extraordinary beings, producing an effect not dissimilar to the opening and shutting of a bird’s wing, the alternations of which carry it up and down.
As they slid past us, perhaps not more than a good stone’s throw from our place of concealment we were permitted to catch a glimpse of them, and it was hard to restrain the impulse of leaping to our feet to obtain a longer inspection. Another moment and they disappeared below the brow of the hill. We emerged cautiously. Goritz spoke first, though he, like the rest of us, seemed a little stunned by the weirdness, the wizardry of it all.
“If they’ve gone down, they must come up. But what are they?”