the ground sank again, like water in a leaking well. In a second that kick of his wings had lost its effect, and the ground was welling up. He kicked again. It was strange, going forward with the earth ebbing and flowing beneath him, in the utter silence of his down-fringed feathers.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ panted Archimedes, bobbing in the dark air beside him, ‘stop flying like a woodpecker. Anybody would take you for a Little Owl, if the creatures had been imported. What you are doing is to give yourself flying speed with one flick of your wings. You then rise on that flick until you have lost flying speed and begin to stall. Then you give another just as you are beginning to drop out of the air, and do a switch-back. It is confusing to keep up with you.’
‘Well,’ said the Wart recklessly, ‘if I stop doing this I shall go bump altogether.’
‘Idiot,’ said the owl. ‘Waver your wings all the time, like me, instead of doing these jumps with them.’
The Wart did what he was told, and was surprised to find that the earth became stable and moved underneath him without tilting, in a regular pour. He did not feel himself to be moving at all.
‘That’s better.’
‘How curious everything looks,’ observed the boy with some wonder, now that he had time to look about him.
And, indeed, the world did look curious. In some ways the best description of it would be to say that it looked like a photographer’s negative, for he was seeing one ray beyond the spectrum which is visible to human beings. An infra-red camera will take photographs in the dark, when we cannot see, and it will also take photographs in daylight. The owls are the same, for it is untrue that they can only see at night. They see in the day just as well, only they happen to possess the advantage of seeing pretty well at night also. So naturally they prefer to do their hunting then, when other creatures are more at their mercy. To the Wart the green trees would have looked whitish in the daytime, as if they were covered with apple-blossom, and now, at night, everything had the same kind of different look. It was like flying in a twilight which had reduced everything to shades of the same colour, and, as in the twilight, there was a considerable amount of gloom.
‘Do you like it?’ asked the owl.
‘I like it very much. Do you know, when I was a fish there were parts of the water which were colder or warmer than the other parts, and now it is the same in the air.’
‘The temperature,’ said Archimedes, ‘depends on the vegetation of the bottom. Woods or weeds, they make it warm above them.’
‘Well,’ said the Wart, ‘I can see why the reptiles who had given up being fishes decided to become birds. It certainly is fun.’
‘You are beginning to fit things together,’ remarked Archimedes. ‘Do you mind if we sit down?’
‘How does one?’
‘You must stall. That means you must drive yourself up until you lose flying speed, and then, just as you feel yourself beginning to tumble – you sit down. Have you never noticed how birds fly upward to perch? They don’t come straight down on the branch, but dive below it and then rise. At the top of their rise they stall and sit down.’
‘But birds land on the ground too. And what about mallards on the water? They can’t rise to sit on that.’
‘Well, it is perfectly possible to land on flat things, but more difficult. You have to glide in at stalling speed all the way, and then increase your wind resistance by cupping your wings, dropping your feet, tail, etc. You may have noticed that few birds do it gracefully. Look how a crow thumps down and how the mallard splashes. The spoon-winged birds like heron and plover seem to do it best. As a matter of fact, we owls are not so bad at it ourselves.’
‘And the long-winged birds like swifts, I suppose they are the worst, for they can’t rise from a flat surface at all?’
‘The reasons are different,’ said Archimedes, ‘yet the fact is true. But need we talk on the wing? I am getting tired.’
‘So am I.’
‘Owls usually prefer to sit down every hundred yards.’
The Wart copied Archimedes in zooming up toward the branch which they had chosen. He began to fall just as they were above it, clutched it with his furry feet at the last moment, swayed backward and forward twice, and found that he had landed successfully. He folded up his wings.
While the Wart sat still and admired the view, his friend proceeded to give him a lecture about flight in birds. He told how, although the swift was so fine a flyer that he could sleep on the wing all night, and although the Wart himself had claimed to admire the way in which rooks enjoyed their flights, the real aeronaut of the lower strata – which cut out the swift – was the plover. He explained how plovers indulged in aerobatics, and would actually do such stunts as spins, stall turns and even rolls for the mere grace of the thing. They were the only birds which made a practice of slipping off height to land – except occasionally the oldest, gayest and most beautiful of all the conscious aeronauts, the raven. Wart paid little or no attention to the lecture, but got his eyes accustomed to the strange tones of light instead, and watched Archimedes from the corner of one of them. For Archimedes, while he was talking, was absent-mindedly spying for his dinner. This spying was an odd performance.
A spinning top which is beginning to lose its spin slowly describes circles with its highest point before falling down. The leg of the top remains in the same place, but the apex makes circles which get bigger and bigger toward the end. This is what Archimedes was absent-mindedly doing. His feet remained stationary, but he moved the upper part of his body round and round, like somebody trying to see from behind a fat lady at a cinema, and uncertain which side of her gave the best view. As he could also turn his head almost completely round on his shoulders, you may imagine that his antics were worth watching.
‘What are you doing?’ asked the Wart.
Even as he asked, Archimedes was gone. First there had been an owl talking about plover, and then there was no owl. Only, far below the Wart, there was a thump and a rattle of leaves, as the aerial torpedo went smack into the middle of a bush, regardless of obstructions.
In a minute the owl was sitting beside him again on the branch, thoughtfully breaking up a dead sparrow.
‘May I do that?’ asked the Wart, inclined to be blood-thirsty.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Archimedes, after waiting to crop his mouthful, ‘you may not. The magic mouse which turned you into an owl will be enough for you – after all, you have been eating as a human all day – and no owl kills for pleasure. Besides, I am supposed to be taking you for education, and, as soon as I have finished my snack here, that is what we shall have to do.’
‘Where are you going to take me?’
Archimedes finished his sparrow, wiped his beak politely on the bough, and turned his eyes full on the Wart. These great, round eyes had, as a famous writer had expressed it, a bloom of light upon them like the purple bloom on a grape.
‘Now that you have learned to fly,’ he said, ‘Merlyn wants you to try the Wild Geese.’
The place in which he found himself was absolutely flat. In the human world we seldom see flatness, for the trees and houses and hedges give a serrated edge to the landscape. Even the grass sticks up with its myriad blades. But here, in the belly of the night, the illimitable, flat,
