with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
laboratory--February, March. By the end of March the completion was in
sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we
had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane
we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds
of the steel shell--it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,
with a roller blind to each facet--had arrived by February, and the
lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March, the
metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture,
and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds.
It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of Cavor's first
inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting together of
the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough roof of the
temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build a furnace
about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the paste is
heated to a dull red glow in a stream of helium, would be accomplished
when it was already on the sphere.

And then we had to discuss and decide what provisions we were to
take--compressed foods, concentrated essences, steel cylinders containing
reserve oxygen, an arrangement for removing carbonic acid and waste from
the air and restoring oxygen by means of sodium peroxide, water
condensers, and so forth. I remember the little heap they made in the
corner--tins, and rolls, and boxes--convincingly matter-of-fact.

It was a strenuous time, with little chance of thinking. But one day,
when we were drawing near the end, an odd mood came over me. I had been
bricking up the furnace all the morning, and I sat down by these
possessions dead beat. Everything seemed dull and incredible.