“‘THE TRAM!’ EXCLAIMED URSULA, HALF RISING”
The villagers ran round the corner, emptily shouting. The tram sailed serenely on.
“Sit still,” said the Jonker between his closed teeth. The advice was superfluous, for the girl had immediately sunk back again, clutching the hand-rail beside and behind her, frozen to calm. She did not answer, and the vehicle went rushing on.
Forward the naked road stretched, white and thin, between two dark lines of water; forward the horse flew, drinking, as it were, that road before it with pendent head—crashing onward in a cloud of dust and stones and sparks. There was nothing to confront or pass them as they tore through yielding infinity, except here and there a sleepy calf that tried to race them as children would a train. There was nothing but the wide lilac heaven all around, with the boundlessness of a horizon that ever recedes and a highway that ever lengthens out. It was the very delirium and terror of motion, such as few mortals can experience, the irresisted, irresistible forward rush of the whole being—the concentration of all thought into that one idea of a sweep through immensity. For one moment the laws of time and space were annulled; there was no distance, no limit, no measurement, nothing but an infinite impression of velocity. The high carriage sailed through the summer warmth like a bird. On—on—on! For ever and ever. Why, indeed, should it stop?
And then the conviction that stoppage is inevitable, is imminent, and that it may well mean—death.
All that, not in a succession of impressions, but in one long-drawn lightning flash, like the flash of the flying brute, only faster.
Ursula looked up once at Van Helmont. His face was carved in bronze; his arms were straining back; his feet had bent out the splash-board. In another moment it burst away from them in a wide crash of splinters, and threw him forward, silent still. He righted himself with a jerk, but it seemed as if the horse had received a new impetus from the slackening even of that illusory hold. She swept the ground from under her as the tall wheels appeared to stop revolving, in a constant blaze of starlight. Ursula fancied, from the height where she clung, that their progress carried with it a crimson glow through the swiftly receding dust. But it was all so short, though it seemed eternity, and yet she remembers, this very day, each sensation that rose and sank across her brain. Her hat was gone; her hair was flying. One minute of that wild, mad stress, and then—
“I must save you,” said Otto. “Don’t mind how.”