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times against metal walls, but I could not hear it fall to rest.
Taking my courage in my hands all my life I have suffered a certain dread of subterranean places I
stepped towards the lip of the well. I saw that its sides were sheer: evidently finely manufactured, and
constructed of what appeared to be cast iron. But the iron was extensively flaked and rusted.
Looking around from this summit, I saw now a pattern to the damaged landscape: the ovens, the flimsier
huts, were smashed and scattered outwards from this central spot, as if some great explosion had once
occurred here. And I saw how disturbed soil streaked across the land, radially away from the hill; from a
balloon, I speculated, these stripes of discoloration might have resembled the rays around the great
craters of the Moon.
This Ozymandian scene was terrifically poignant: great things had been wrought here, and yet now these
immense devices lay ruined, broken forgotten.
Ardan paced about by the lip of the abandoned cannon; he exuded an extraordinary restlessness, as if
the whole of the Earth had become a cage insufficient for him. 'It was magnificent!' he cried. 'When the
electrical spark ignited the gun-cotton, and the ground shook, and the pillar of flame hurled aside the air,
throwing over the spectators and their horses like matchstalks!... And there was the barest glimpse of the
projectile itself, ascending like a soul in that fiery light...'
I gazed up at the hot, blank sky, and imagined this Barbicane climbing into his cannon-shell, to the
applause of his ageing friends. He would have called it bravery, I suppose. But how easy it must have
been, to sail away into the infinite aether for ever! and to leave behind the Earthbound complexities of
debtors and broken promises. Was Barbicane exploring, I wondered or escaping?
As I plunge towards the glowing pool of Martian air as that russet, cratered barrenness opens
out beneath me I descend into despair. Is all of the Solar System to prove as bleak as the worlds
I have visited?
This must be my last transmission. I wish my final words to be an utterance of deepest gratitude to
my loyal friends, notably Col. J. T. Maston and my partners in the National Company of
Interstellar Communication, who have followed my fruitless journey across space for so many
months.
I am sure this new defeat will be trumpeted by those jackals who hounded my National Company
into bankruptcy; with nothing but dead landscapes as his destination, it may be many decades
before man leaves the air of Earth again!
'Sir, it seems I must credit your veracity. But what is it you want of me? Why have you brought me here?'
After his Gallic fashion, he grabbed at my arm. 'I have read your books. I know you are a man of
imagination. You must publish Maston's account tell the story of this place...'
'But why? What would be the purpose? If Common Man is unimpressed by such exploits if he regards
these feats as a hoax, or a cynical exploitation by gun-manufacturers who am I to argue against him?
We have entered a new century, M. Ardan: the century of Socialism. We must concentrate on the needs
of Earth on poverty, injustice, disease and turn our faces to new worlds only when we have reached
our manhood on this one...'
But Ardan heard none of this. He still gripped my arm, and again I saw that wildness in his old
eyes eyes that had, perhaps, seen too much. 'I would go back! That is all. I am embedded in gravity. It
clings, it clings! Oh, Mr. Wells, let me go back!'
Brigantia's Angels
'[It was] a peaceful night... I went to bed and was awakened by the roar of the wind, the crash of the
breakers... When it was light I went down to see how it [the machine] had fared and found it scattered
about a field...
Bill Frost, Western Mail, 1932.
1 The Storm
The street door opened, and the rattle of the wind almost drowned out his mother's voice.
'Jimmy!'
Jimmy Griffiths was lounging on his bed upstairs, reading his London pamphlets. The draught, piercing the
ill-fitting window frames, was making his lamp flame flicker. 'What?'
'It's Bill Frost, here to see you...'
Bill Frost? Jimmy pushed his face closer to the murky type of the pamphlets. 'Mother, if he's trying to
get me back into his choir again, tell him I'm not interested.'
'It's not the choir, Jimmy,' his mother said uncertainly. 'You'd better come down.'
With an elaborate sigh, Jimmy threw his pamphlets down on the crumpled blanket.
Downstairs his mother stood before the open door, her small, nervous hands buried in her apron. The
door from the street opened straight into the parlour, and the wind was intruding into the room like some
invisible animal: rattling the brasses on the range, clattering the framed prints from the Graphic in their
neat rows on the walls, and scattering September leaves across the polished floor tiles. And the doorway
framed the unprepossessing figure of Bill Frost: thin-faced, his lined mouth hidden by a tired moustache, a
drab tie knotted tight up against his throat.
'Bill says he couldn't think where else to go,' his mother said.
Bill's eyes were shadowed, like hollows in a log. Despite himself, Jimmy's heart moved. 'Is somebody ill?'
Bill Frost mumbled something, dropping his eyes.
'Bill wants your help,' his mother said.
'Help with what?'
'With his machine.' Her grey eyes seemed to be begging him to go along with Bill, out into the storm. And
why? just to avoid a little social awkwardness, no doubt.
Jimmy looked from one to other, a slow, familiar impatience burning in him. Bill Frost was forty-seven
years old: a deacon at the chapel, the founder of the local choir, a sound carpenter, and a good
neighbour to his parents, he knew. And yet here he was, so suppressed by his own provincial
awkwardness that he couldn't even speak for himself. In God's name, this is 1895. In London, things
are on the move. A new century is nearly on us; blood is rising. You wouldn't think so, here on the
coast of Godforsaken Pembrokeshire!
'What bloody machine?' Jimmy snapped.
Frost mumbled again, looking down at his cap.
'What?'
'He said,' his mother replied with dogged determination, 'his flying machine.'
Bill Frost's cottage was a quarter-mile further up St Bride's Hill from the Griffiths's.
Bill marched stiffly up the path, his anxiety obvious in every movement of his angular body. Buffeted by
the air, Jimmy pulled his cap down over his ears and followed.
It was eleven o'clock. There was a quarter-moon, its face criss-crossed by scudding clouds. The trees
around Jimmy were huge and invisible and moving in the dark winds, like ancient giants. Behind him, the
Hill swept down to Saundersfoot Bay, and from the harbour rose the anxious tolling of a colliery boat
bell, the sustained crash of breakers.
After a hundred yards or so Bill turned off the path, making towards Fred Watkins's farm.
'So,' Jimmy shouted across the wind, 'what about this machine of yours, Bill?'
Bill turned his narrow head. 'It crashed. The wheels caught in the top branches of a tree. You know, that
big ash at the bottom of Fred Watkins's field '
'What caught in the ash tree?'
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