The sense of speed, of gigantic transition, of going southward, downward, over three countries, the tremendous mountain ranges, the sense at once of descent, tremendous regression, and of moving, not moving, but in another way dropped straight down the world, straight down the map, as of the imminence of something great, phenomenal, and yet the moving shadow of the plane below them, the eternal moving cross, less fleeting and more substantial than the dim shadw of the significance of what they were doing that Sigborn held in his mind: any yeyt it was possible only to focuson that shadow, and at that only for short periods: they were enclosed by the thingitself as by the huge bouncing machine with its vast monotonous purring, pouring din, in which they sat none too comfortabl, Sigborn with his foot up embarrassedly, for he had taken his shoe off, a moving, defeaning, continually renewed time-defeating destiny by which they were enclosed but of which they were able only to see the inside, for so to speak of the streamlined platinum-colored object itself they could only glimpse a wing, a propeller, through the small, foolish, narrow oblong windows.