Night Wings
By Jack Snow
Nerle stood for a moment in the window looking far down at the moonlit garden with its nodding, moist blossoms and lichenous, aged trunks. A moth flitted past his shoulder in search of flame. A rush of cool air swept around him, fluttering the window draperies. He was wrapped deep in thought, his mind far away, like an adventurer in strange lands. He stood on the very edge of the open window. Suddenly he felt himself falling—down—down. He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the earth rushing toward him. A host of lights sped like comet-tails across his eyelids. He waited for the impact.
He was still falling—gently now—like an autumn leaf on a full, swelling breeze. Slowly he opened his eyes. The earth was only a few feet below him, he was floating toward it as gracefully as a feather loosened from the plumage of a bird. Now the tips of his toes touched the glistening, dew-beaded grass-blades and became moist and coolly damp with the crystal drops. And then just as his toes touched the grass he felt himself soaring high into the air again, rebounding as if he were the lightest of airy bubbles.
Far above the tops of the tallest trees he rose and floated on and on. How cool the breeze! How gently it caressed his tired body, as if it would soothe him into rest!
The earth lay far below him. He flew gracefully on through the silver darkness. At times he rolled on his back and watched the blue, peaceful heavens flow past him. The twinkling stars nodded as if all were understood between them and there were no mysteries at all. Again he lay with his face toward the dark, sleeping earth. How sad it looked and forsaken—the quiet, shell-like houses, the dim, deserted lanes and alleys, the feeble street lamps flickering, the melancholy trees sighing as the flowing wind plied their branches to and fro in a mournful revery and seemed to whistle a sorrowful accompaniment to its own melody as it swept around comers and rolled up hills and sank into vales!
All this Nerle saw as he flew on and on, and the flying was no effort, for he was a bit of the merest flotsam on a great soft sea. Once he passed over a town and swept low into the streets. Two men saw him and pointed and opened their mouths as if to shout in wonder, although Nerle heard no sound whatever. Again he circled around the belfry of an old church. The dust of the village lay thick on its stones, and as he swept past, three large bats fell from their perches and began swooping about in ever-increasing circles, their ribbed wings clicking through the wind like ghastly castanets.
He followed the liquid path of a stream whose waters were bathed in moonlight and leapt over massy stones to leave them dripping with streams of the purest silver. He watched it farther on as it hurtled madly over a fall and dashed headlong onto the rocks below., He flew low enough to catch the cool spray in his face and listen to the roar of the waters and glimpse a silver fin leap for an instant from its depths.
Farther on, the stream widened into a lake, a placid, moonlit, shimmering lake, whose still surface
