I was hoping wildly that somebody whom I had known might still survive. But by this time I was beginning to pull myself together. I resolved to wait for his decision. “Now, friend,” he said, as if he had made up his mind, “your top got stuffed making those factory pictures, as was very natural. Now, I think you had better go back to London, and I’ll take you there, since your friends have shaken you. But of course it must be the police station. I can’t risk my own liberty. Once more, are you sure you want to go? If not, I haven’t seen you.” “I’ll go,” I answered indifferently. “Yap? Step in, then!” I took my seat beside him. It will seem incredible, but I had never ridden in an airplane before. In my other days only a few had seen these craft. It was hardly more than six years since the Wrights had flown when my long sleep began. In spite of my oppression of mind, or perhaps because the days of horror that I had spent in the cellar produced the unavoidable reaction, I began to feel the exhilaration of the flight as we ascended to a height of perhaps a thousand feet and drove northward. The sensation was that of sitting still and seeing the trees flit by beneath me, and would have been pleasing but for the intense cold, which pierced through my rags and numbed me. I perceived that the airplane was under perfect control, and could be stayed without falling. After a while I realized that there was no motor. My companion saw me looking at the machine. “Improved solar type,” he said, patting her caressingly. “Better than a bird, isn’t she?” He turned toward me. “You’ve been sleeping in the wood these three days?” he asked. “And find the factories best? I don’t score you for that. Where’s the rest of you? Five, weren’t there? Why didn’t you keep together? Where’s that bishop of yours?” But, seeing that he could elicit no comprehensible answer to his repeated questions—in truth, I did not know how to reply—he relapsed into an equal silence. And now the white bank that I had seen on the horizon began to assume crenellations, which in turn became buildings of immense height and symmetrical aspect. And I forgot my situation in admiration and amazement at the panorama that began to unfold beneath us. The county of Surrey appeared to be an extensive forest, ending about a waste of dismantled brick, the suburbs of old London, which extended on each side as far as I could see. Then the modern town began: an outer ring of what I took to be enormous factories and storage warehouses; an inner ring, no doubt, of residences; and then the nucleus, the most splendid city that the imagination could have devised.