He put the glasses to his eyes, and took a long look through them.
Moving them slowly up and down, and from side to side, he saw hundreds
of winged figures rising from the island and floating towards them.
"You were right, dear," he said, without taking the glass from his eyes,
"and so was I. If those aren't angels, they're certainly something like
men, and, I suppose, women too who can fly. We may as well stop here and
wait for them. I wonder what sort of an animal they take the _Astronef_
for."
He sent a message down the tube to Murgatroyd and gave a turn and a half
to the steering-wheel. The propellers slowed down and the _Astronef_
dropped with a hardly-perceptible shock in the midst of a little plateau
covered with a thick, soft moss of a pale yellowish green, and fringed
by a belt of trees which seemed to be over three hundred feet high, and
whose foliage was a deep golden bronze.
They had scarcely landed before the flying figures reappeared over the
tree tops and swept downwards in long spiral curves towards the
_Astronef_.
"If they're not angels, they're very like them," said Zaidie, putting
down her glasses.
"There's one thing, they fly a lot better than the old masters' angels
or Dore's could have done, because they have tails--or at least
something that seems to serve the same purpose, and yet they haven't got
feathers.
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