Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational
account of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through
him and filled him to the brim. He felt with a sort of
half-witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was
there, and the dome was there, that he was going to climb down
from them, and that he did not mind in the least whether he was
killed or not. This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start
him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it. But
six times before he reached the highest of the outer galleries
terror had returned on him like a flying storm of darkness and
thunder. By the time he had reached that place of safety he
almost felt (as in some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he
had two heads; one was calm, careless, and efficient; the other
saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless.
He had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down
the face of the whole building. When he dropped into the upper
gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe as if he
had only dropped from the sun to the moon. He paused a little,
panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels,
moving a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt
struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed
indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of
buttons, blocked his way. Michael had no mind to wonder whether
this solid astonished man, with the brown moustache and the
nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He merely let his
mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He thought how
nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with that
one man for ever. He thought how he would luxuriate in the
nameless shades of this man's soul and then hear with an endless