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gloriously untrammelled and diaphanous. Certes, it was not without painful anxiety that Arcade, Istar, and Zita prepared themselves to pass from the heavy atmosphere of the earth to the limpid depths of the heavens. To plunge into the ether there is need to expend such energy that the most intrepid hesitate to take flight. Their very substance, while penetrating this fine medium, must in itself grow fine-spun, become vaporised, and pass from human dimensions to the volume of the vastest clouds which have ever enveloped the earth. Soon they would surpass in grandeur the uttermost planets, whose orbits they, invisible and imponderable, would traverse without disturbing.
In this enterprise—the vastest that angels could undertake—their substance would be ultimately hotter than the fire and colder than the ice, and they would suffer pangs sharper than death.
Maurice read all the daring and the pain of the undertaking in the eyes of Arcade.
“You are going?” he said to him, weeping.
“We are going, with Nectaire, to seek the great archangel to lead us to victory.”
“Whom do you call thus?”
“The priests of the demiurge have made him known to you in their calumnies.”
“Unhappy being,” sighed Maurice.
Arcade embraced him, and Maurice felt the angel’s tears as they dropped upon his cheek.
