The flying ship of Professor Lucifer sang through
the skies like a silver arrow; the bleak white steel
of it, gleaming in the bleak blue emptiness of the
evening. That it was far above the earth was
no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed
to be far above the stars. The professor had
himself invented the flying machine, and had also
invented nearly everything in it. Every sort
of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full,
that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to
the miracles of science. For the world of science
and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and
like a dream than the world of poetry and religion;
since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves
eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution
that identities melt into each other as they do in
a nightmare.
All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient
human tools gone mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes,
forgetful of their origin, forgetful of their names.
That thing which looked like an enormous key with
three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver.
That object which seemed to be created by the entanglement
of two corkscrews was really the key. The thing
which might have been mistaken for a tricycle turned
upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument
to which the corkscrew was the key. All these
things, as I say, the professor had invented; he had
invented everything in the flying ship, with the exception,
perhaps, of himself. This he had been born too
late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least,
that he had considerably improved it.
There was, however, another man on board, so to speak,
at the time. Him, also, by a curious coincidence,
the professor had not invented, and him he had not
even very greatly improved, though he had fished him
up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western
Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him.
He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered
with white hair. You could see nothing but his
eyes, and he seemed to talk with them. A monk
of immense learning and acute intellect he had made
himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony
garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most
crushing refutations of exposures of certain heresies,
the last professors of which had been burnt (generally
by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously.
They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies,
and it was really a creditable or even glorious circumstance,
that the old monk had been intellectual enough to
detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that
nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough
even to understand their argument. The old monk,
one of whose names was Michael, and the other a name
quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western
civilization, had, however, as I have said, made himself
quite happy while he was in a mountain hermitage in
the society of wild animals. And now that his
luck had lifted him above all the mountains in the
society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy
still.
