As we drew nearer his pace slackened.  Then he stopped and pointed, and I saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground.  The tussocks were blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke, pale, blue, steady.  Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to take its place:  a little centre of wind in the stillness.  Overhead the boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared.  Otherwise, not a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard.  The wood was still as a graveyard.  A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken bubble.  Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason, causing its throne to shake.

John Silence moved forward again.  I could not see his face, but his attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for vigorous action.  We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished.  The tail of the column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of the wind was gone.  The calm spirit of the fresh October day resumed command.

Side by side we advanced and examined the place.  The grass was smouldering, the ground still hot.  The circle of burned earth was a foot to a foot and a half in diameter.  It looked like an ordinary picnic fireplace.  I bent down cautiously to look, but in a second I sprang back with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor stamped on the ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose from the spot as though he had kicked a living creature.  This hissing was faintly audible in the air.  It moved past us, away towards the thicker portion of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second Dr. Silence had left the fire and started in pursuit.

And then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever conceive.

He went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly obvious that he was following something.  To judge by the poise of his head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level—­just above the height of a man—­and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the roughness of the ground.  The hissing sound had stopped.  There was no sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me.  I only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, I followed as quickly as I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him.