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And the white rabbit, nibbling at his birch-twigs, was left in undisputed possession of the scintillating rainbow world. By the Winter Tide Behind the long, slow-winding barrier of the dyke the marshes of Tantramar lay secure, mile on mile of blue-white radiance under the unclouded moon. Outside the dyke it was different.
"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have to dodge some ack." But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin, blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to descend. It was not directly above the grid.
The sound we knew well enough; the place it came from was the left shoulder of Matawana's Hoek; the place it would arrive at we waited, half anxious, half idly curious, to see. Whirr whizz e-e-e-e phutt! Heavens, on to the very top of a gun! For a second the gun was a whirl of blue-white smoke, with grey-black figures struggling and plunging inside it.
To view the scene by moonlight is alone an experience which would repay much travelling. The fires have sunk to red, glowing specks. The bayonets glisten in a regular line of blue-white points. The silence of weariness is broken by the incessant and uneasy shuffling of the animals and the occasional neighing of the horses.
Far below, down there a hundred feet beneath them and out a long way from the tower base, night yawned wide in a burst of hellish glare. A vast conical hole of flame was gouged in the dark. For a fraction of a second every tree, limb, twig stood out in vivid detail, as that blue-white glory shot aloft.
"He came pretty near finishing himself, the second day he was here, all the same," added Grant. "Did you hear about it, papa? Nobody'd told him to look out a little, till he was used to this air. He started out to run, and it used him up in no time, so he turned blue-white, and nearly dropped. He's taking it slowly, now; and is getting into it by little and little."
He was reassuring the frightened animal and looking quietly down at the girl's face against his breast. Under that quiet look Nan's blue-white lips flushed with life and she tried to smile gratefully. When he smiled back and said, "So you did get back by lilac time," Nan was well enough to wonder what he meant. And the little crowd of rescuers arrived only just in time to hear Nanny thanking him.
"The snow is blue-white here, as it is in Norway I jilted Valpyanov there. The Norwegian people are like trolls. There is no better place than Russia! With you nothing changes. Have you forgiven me that July?" Polunin approached and stood beside her. "Yes, I have forgiven", he said earnestly.
It was as if he were recalling it, not alone from his own past, but from a racial existence a thousand-thousand years before his own birth. His memory was strangely stifled, but, oh, he remembered the moon! Forest had spoken of stimuli! The mere sight of the blue-white beams was the best possible stimulus to call him to himself.
His rider, regaining his poise, found time to look about him and began to enjoy, for all his cares, this wild race through the blue-white night. Behind them, carbine on saddle-bow, the sowar thundered in pursuit, at an interval of about a hundred yards often greater, when the stallions would have it so and spent their temper in brief, brisk contests for the leadership.
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