will be collaborating upon this new step in man's struggle with the
elements. Bacon's visionary House of Saloman [Footnote: In The New
Atlantis.] will be a thing realised, and it will be humming with
this business. Every university in the world will be urgently
working for priority in this aspect of the problem or that. Reports
of experiments, as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of
cricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about the world.
All this will be passing, as it were, behind the act drop of our
first experience, behind this first picture of the urbanised Urseren
valley. The literature of the subject will be growing and developing
with the easy swiftness of an eagle's swoop as we come down the
hillside; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us until this
moment, a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy
specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising,
condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation. Those
who are concerned with the problems of public locomotion will
be following these aeronautic investigations with a keen and
enterprising interest, and so will the physiologist and the
sociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like an eagle's
swoop in comparison with the blind-man's fumbling of our terrestrial
way. Even before our own brief Utopian journey is out, we may get a
glimpse of the swift ripening of all this activity that will be in
progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a day or so,
some silent, distant thing will come gliding into view over the
mountains, will turn and soar and pass again beyond our astonished
sight....


Section 6