Chapter I

I was here alone one summer's night; a night of stars, but without a moon. I lay within the scrub of the western valley-head and looked south. I could just see the profile of the enfolding hills, but only just; could guess that in the soft blackness below me, filling up the foreground like a lake, the valley was there indeed; realise that if I stepped down, perhaps thirty yards or so, my feet would sink into the pile of the turf-carpet, and feel the sharp benediction of the dew. About me surged and beat an enormous silence. The only sound at all--and that was fitful--came from a fern-owl which, from a thorn-bush above me, churred softly and at intervals his content with the night.

The stars were myriad, but sky-marks shone out; the Bear, the Belt, the Chair, the dancing sister Pleiades. The Galaxy was like a snow-cloud; startlingly, by one, by two, meteors flared a short course and died. You never feel lonely when you have the stars; yet they do not pry upon you. You can hide nothing from them, and need not seek to hide. If they have foreknowledge, they nurse no after-thought.

Now, to-night, as I looked and wondered at their beauty, I became aware of a phenomenon untold before. Yet so quietly did it come, and so naturally, that it gave me no disturbance, nor forced itself upon me. A luminous ring, a ring of pale fire, in shape a long, narrow, and fluctuating oval, became discernible in the sky south of my stand-point, midway (I thought) between me and the south.

It was diaphanous, or diaphanous to strong light behind it. At one time I saw the great beacon of the south-west (Saturn, I think) burning through it; not within the ring, but from behind the litten vapour of which the ring was made. Lesser fires than his were put out by it. It varied very much in shape as it spread or drew out, as a smoker's blue rings are varied by puffs of wind. Now it was a perfect round, now so long as to be less a hoop than a fine oblong. Sometimes it was pear-shaped, sometimes amorphous; bulbous here, hollow there. And there seemed movement; I thought now and again that it was spiral as well as circular, that it might, under some stress of speed, writhe upward like dust in a whirlwind. It wavered, certainly, in elevation, lifting, sinking, wafted one way or another with the ease of a cloud of gnats. It was extraordinarily beautiful and exciting. I watched it for an hour.

At times I seemed to be conscious of more than appearance. I cannot speak more definitely than that. Music was assuredly in my head, very shrill, piercing, continuous music. No air, no melody, but the expectancy of an air, preparation for it, a prelude to melodious issues. You may say the overture to some vast aerial symphony; I know not what else to call it. I was never more than alive to it, never certain of it. It was as furtive, secret, and tremulous as the dawn itself. Now, just as under that shivering and tentative opening of great music you are conscious of the fierce energy of violins, so was I aware, in this surmise of music, of wild forces which made it. I thought not of voices but of wings. I was sure that this ring of flame whirled as well as floated in the air; the motion and the sound, alike indecipherable, were one and the same to me.

I watched it, I say, for an hour: it may have been for two hours. By-and-by it came nearer, gradually very near. It was now dazzling, not to be looked at full; but its rate of approach was inappreciable, and as it came on I was able to peer into it and see nothing but its beauty. There was a core of intensity, intolerably bright; about that, lambency but no flame, in which I saw leaves and straws and fronds of fern flickering, spiring, heeling over and over. That it whirled as well as floated was now clear, for a strong wind blew before and after it as it rushed by. This happened as I sat there. Blinding but not burning, heralded by a keen wind, it came by me and passed; a swift wind followed it as it went. It swept out toward the hollow of the eastern valley-head, seemed to strike upon that and glance upward; thence it swept gladly up, streaming to the zenith, grew thin, fine and filmy, and seemed to melt into the utmost stars. I had seen wonders and went home full of thought.