Lychnis, in the meanwhile, was off to the south-west with Yuan in the Dragon. The stars were on fire in heaven; there was a space of white light about the moon; far below slid the perfumed forest. She sat behind Yuan in the hollow body of the creature, and he, slung between the wings, bent this way and that, wheeling and dipping his fantastic chariot; and sometimes, when he had climbed the peak of the wind, he would fling himself forward, and she would see the dark, rushing world beyond the streak of moon on his shoulders as they swooped on a hundred miles through the night. Then, after a few moments of rest on some hill that loomed up out of the void, a soft purr of his mysterious engine or a beat of the wings and the chariot sprang up and forward like an eagle. Slung behind him, sometimes touching him, Lychnis felt with her body that Yuan knew the air, knew all the roads, the precipices, the rapids of the air. He behaved as a far-travelling bird would behave, beating along the vast empty ways of the night with repeated crutch-strokes, or spreading out silver wings along the swift surface of a wind. Or, if he wearied, the tiny engine was switched on, and they traversed the sky with the speed of a meteor. Through him she knew the airways and lent him her movements, balancing and clinging with him on the huge precipice-face of the winds they were climbing, giving herself without shrinking to the fearful descent into a huge, opening nothingness. From time to time she caught a glimpse of his cheek. He threw her back an unsounded word, and she made noiseless answers with her small whispering mouth to his ear. He was intent and still, and his stillness held her, so that in spite of the dark void below she had no fear. Only the wind and the world moved, and they seemed intensely still in the midst of the sky, with their small heads so close. Time had no meaning, and space twisted and wheeled around them. Soon, very far off, under a slanting beam of the moon, there came, as if the edge of space were advancing toward them, a glimmering of white petals, a flush of sacred lilies floating on the dark pool of the sky, lotuses waving about the feet of some Boddhisatva, for whom the Dragon was bearing on his back a beautiful captive to minister to his contempt of desire. But before the lilies came close, Yuan leant forward, and the dark pool of the world rushed up and engulfed them. The forest streamed up and out like black foam. Yuan hung over it, a silver moth, then brought the breast of the Dragon to the flood of a gleaming river. “The jungle,” he whispered. There was a clamour of wild creatures. It suddenly faded to a far distance. “They smell a flesh-eater,” he murmured.