down and frowning at him. Then the spectacle vanished, as a light
goes out.

Maskull stood inactive, with a thumping heart. Now he again heard
the solitary trumpet note. The sound began this time faintly in the
far distance in front of him, travelled slowly toward him with
regularly increasing intensity, passed overhead at its loudest, and
then grew more and more quiet, wonderful, and solemn, as it fell away
in the rear, until the note was merged in the deathlike silence of
the forest. It appeared to Maskull like the closing of a marvellous
and important chapter.

Simultaneously with the fading away of the sound, the heavens seemed
to open up with the rapidity of lightning into a blue vault of
immeasurable height. He breathed a great breath, stretched all his
limbs, and looked around him with a slow smile.

After a while he resumed his journey. His brain was all dark and
confused, but one idea was already beginning to stand out from the
rest--huge, shapeless, and grand, like the growing image in the soul
of a creative artist: the staggering thought that he was a man of
destiny.

The more he reflected upon all that had occurred since his arrival in
this new world--and even before leaving Earth--the clearer and more
indisputable it became, that he could not be here for his own
purposes, but must be here for an end. But what that end was, he
could not imagine.

Through the forest he saw Branchspell at last sinking in the west.