preternaturally clear, and the solitude became so irksome that I rose
from my seat, and looked out of the scuttles to relieve the tension of
my nerves.

Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky
was a dead black, and the stars had ceased to twinkle. By the same
illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level of the
spectator on a hillside, the sable cloud beneath was dished out, and the
car seemed to float in the middle of an immense dark sphere, whose upper
half was strewn with silver. Looking down into the dark gulf below, I
could see a ruddy light streaming through a rift in the clouds. It was
probably a last glimpse of London, or some neighbouring town; but soon
the rolling vapours closed, and shut it out.

I now realised to the full that I was _nowhere_, or to speak more
correctly, a wanderer in empty space--that I had left one world behind
me and was travelling to another, like a disembodied spirit crossing the
gloomy Styx. A strange serenity took possession of my soul, and all that
had polluted or degraded it in the lower life seemed to fall away from
it like the shadow of an evil dream.

In the depths of my heart I no longer felt sorry to quit the earth. It
seemed to me now, a place where the loveliest things never come to
birth, or die the soonest--where life itself hangs on a blind mischance,
where true friendship is afraid to show its face, where pure love is
unrequited or betrayed, and the noblest benefactors of their fellowmen
have been reviled or done to death--a place which we regard as a heaven
when we enter it, and a hell before we leave it. . . . No, I was not
sorry to quit the earth.