I got to earth, loosened the straps and struggled out of them, and looked around for fuel. There was a fair quantity of coarse withered scrub sticking up through the snow here, and I soon had a pyre built big enough for my purpose. On to this I dragged the wings and held my flint ready to kindle the strange sacrifice. Up to the present, be it noted, I had acted under a sort of blind impulse to perform a duty, as required of me by my oath; I didn't think, I couldn't. The long-deferred sleep was sweeping over me in waves; I was hard put to it to stand, and I retained just sufficient consciousness to know that if I fell I should lose it immediately. Then, however, as I stared at those wings, sleep for a moment retreated again, pushed back by an overwhelming curiosity. I could not bring myself to destroy that marvellous mechanism without one last attempt to probe its secret. I knelt beside it and began tugging at the power-box with my hands. I could make no impression either upon the box or the slender connecting rods that protruded from it. Time was short. The irresistible sleep might come upon me at any instant. I found a fragment of rock about as big as my clenched fist and set about breaking the box open with that. Standing at the head of the folded wings I raised that stone and hurled it down on to the wings with all the strength left in me. The next instant I was hurled down myself, while something spread itself above me, darkening the sky, and then was gone. _The wings had sprung up and flown away._ I lay on my back, gasping. Of all the uncanny shocks ever meted out to a human being, I question whether any could have been more startling than that one of mine on those lonely mountain slopes. For an instant I was veritably inclined to believe those wings embodied not only a mysterious force, but a sentient mind and will, and that finding themselves attacked they had sprung up to attack me. It was a fantastic notion, yet at the time and in the circumstances I imagine anybody might have been excused for harbouring it. What had really happened, of course, was simple enough. In trying to wrench open that box with my hands I had unwittingly pressed it down on to the brushwood; the jar of the stone forced it down still farther, thus causing the levers to turn and setting the power in action, and the wings, obeying the law of their construction, had immediately unfolded and started to flap.