And the truth is that I had one eye on an ancient and timeless clock, hung
uselessly in heaven; whose very name has passed into a figure for such
bemused folly. In the true sense of an ancient phrase, I was moonstruck.
A lunar landscape a scene of winter moonlight had inexplicably got in
between me and all other scenes. If any one had asked me I could not have
said what it was; I cannot say now. Nothing had occurred to me; except
the breakdown of a hired motor on the ridge of a hill. It was not an
adventure; it was a vision.

I had started in wintry twilight from my own door; and hired a small car
that found its way across the hills towards Naphill. But as night
blackened and frost brightened and hardened it I found the way
increasingly difficult; especially as the way was an incessant ascent.
Whenever we topped a road like a staircase it was only to turn into a yet
steeper road like a ladder.

At last, when I began to fancy that I was spirally climbing the Tower of
Babel in a dream, I was brought to fact by alarming noises, stoppage, and
the driver saying that "it couldn't be done." I got out of the car and
suddenly forgot that I had ever been in it.

From the edge of that abrupt steep I saw something indescribable, which I
am now going to describe. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain delivered his great
patriotic speech on the inferiority of England to the Dutch parts of South
Africa, he made use of the expression "the illimitable veldt." The word
"veldt" is Dutch, and the word "illimitable" is Double Dutch. But the
meditative statesman probably meant that the new plains gave him a sense
of largeness and dreariness which he had never found in England. Well,
if he never found it in England it was because he never looked for it in
England. In England there is an illimitable number of illimitable veldts.