It was after the evening meal, at a time which might have corresponded to an hour or so before midnight, that the selected eighteen girls began to arrive. Miela brought them into the living room with us until they were all together.
It was a curious gathering—this bevy of Mercutian maidens. They all seemed between the ages of sixteen and twenty‑three—fragile, dainty little wisps of femininity, yet having a strength in their highly developed wing muscles that was truly surprising.
They were dressed in the characteristic costume I have described, with only a slight divergence of color or ornamentation. They were of only two types—jet black tresses, black eyes, and red‑feathered wings like Miela; or the less vivid, more ethereal Anina—blue‑eyed, golden‑haired, with wing feathers of light blue.
When they had all arrived we went into the garden behind the house. In a moment more Mercer and I were seated side by side on the little bamboo platform. Miela and Anina took the center positions so that they would be near us. The other girls ranged themselves along the sides, each grasping one of the handles.
In another moment we were in the air. My first sensation was one of a sudden rushing forward and upward. The frail little craft swayed under me alarmingly, but I soon grew used to that. The flapping of those many pairs of huge wings so close was very loud; the wind of our swift forward flight whistled past my ears. Looking down over the side of the platform, between the bodies of two of the girls, I could see the city silently dropping away beneath us. Above there was nothing but the same dead gray sky, black in front, with occasional vivid lightning flashes and the rumble of distant thunder.
Underneath the storm cloud, far ahead, the jagged tops of a range of mountains projected above the horizon. As I watched they seemed slowly creeping up and forward as the horizon rolled back to meet them.
For half an hour or so we sped onward through the air. We were over the mountains now. Great jagged, naked peaks of shining metal towered above us, with that broken, utterly desolate country beneath. We swept continually upward, for the mountains rose steadily in broad serrated ranks before us.
Occasionally we would speed up a narrow defile, with the broken, tumbling cliffs rising abruptly over our heads, only to come out above a level plateau or across a cañon a thousand feet deep or more.
The storm broke upon us. We entered a cloud that wrapped us in its wet mist and hid the mountains from our sight. The darkness of twilight settled down, lighted by flashes of lightning darting almost over our heads. The sharp cracks of thunder so close threatened to split my eardrums.
The wind increased in violence. The little platform trembled and swayed. I could see the girls struggling to hold it firm. At times we would drop abruptly straight down a hundred or two hundred feet, with a great fluttering of wings; but all the time I knew we were rising sharply.