So I thought, but instinct conquered. I was a creature born to the wind and rain, and not to the hidden depths beneath me. Even though these bordering growths were but the kitchen-gardens of the intelligences below,--as indeed they might be,--in a moment I saw it, wondering that I had not seen it sooner. Great stretches of one plant in weedless soil. Even if the life around me were but as that of insects, useful or noxious, or of beasts of food for their keepers,--still here at least was the sun, and something of the stars I knew. Here too, I had met the only creature with which I had changed thoughts, however strangely, and to whom I had made a voiceless promise. At the thought, I rose and went onward. As I thought of it, the idea that I was in a vegetable garden of subterranean giants gained in plausibility. The memory of that unrailed invisible bridge, which to my imagination had seemed as thin and fragile as a sheet of mica, made me doubt for a moment, till I remembered that it spanned the whole space without support from beneath or above, and had not swayed when I crossed it, and that it was of a sufficient width to give breadth of foothold even to the huge bulk of my recent captor, if he were able to walk in confidence across it. With this thought came a wonder of what different world might be upon the higher level of the cliff-top, which now seemed to me as no more than the side of a trenched space of tillage, but I knew that my pledged way was straight onward, even could I have climbed the abrupt wall, which gave no foothold. On my left hand, as I went on, the sea of varnished leaves still sloped downward, stretched away to a now misty horizon, and I began to compare its sameness unfavourably with that of the familiar world I knew, till I considered how little I had yet seen, in comparison with the extent of the probable land-surface which lay beyond me. If a visitor to my own world, from some distant planet, were set down for a few days on the Antarctic continent, how different would be his report from that of one who spent the same time wandering in the Sahara desert, or amid the steaming heat of the Amazonian forests, or the cotton-mills of Lancashire. And there were indications already that I had reached a world where life extended deeply below the surface of the land, and where the sea had its nations also. Only the air seemed vacant, and I was soon to see that that conclusion was premature. I had come to a place at which the cliff-wall, though still too steep to climb for the first ten or twenty yards, sloped backward considerably, so that I had a wider view of the sky above me, and looking up I saw a flock of birds of the appearance of pigeons, having a similar habit of flight, but larger, that moved above me, not flying as at ease, but darting wildly from side to side, as though in avoidance of some deadly danger.