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Updated: September 12, 2025
Only six years later a discovery was made by two English observers, William and Thomas Ball, which enhanced the mystery. Observing the northern face of the ring, which was at that time turned earthwards, they perceived a black stripe of considerable breadth dividing the ring into two concentric portions.
He held his peace for a moment, gazing earthwards and rubbing a small heap of dust towards him with his toe; and then on a sudden he burst out into the tale which is here set down in his own words: "Nay, Saheb, I am possessed of no devil, but my wife Afiza is sore troubled by one.
He opened his eyes upon a flicker of lightning and saw it whirling onwards, growing ever in volume, towards the kopje which Sylvia had never conquered. The blackness of the sky above was appalling. It hung so near, pressing earthwards through that mighty spout. With bated breath he watched till the kopje was blotted from his sight, and the demons of the storm came shrieking back.
As they passed overhead, the reflection of the lurid light on them was smitten earthwards, and passed with them, making everything it traversed clear as noon the lion on the swinging sign of the public-house just across the water, the delicate tracery of the church windows, the virginia creeper on my cottage porch.
"Some cool water, for God's sake!" gasped one of the prostrate men, and a comrade rode to the leading wagon to beg a little from Harvey's well-filled barrel. One or two men threw themselves from the saddle to the sands for brief rest. The dust-cloud slowly settled earthwards in their wake. Mules, horses, and men blinked sleepily, wearily.
These are those men that might have been but were not. And all about thee fluttered the myriad hours travelling in great swarms across the Waste of Nought. "How many centuries passed across the cities while thou wast making thy journey none may reckon, for there is no time in the Waste of Nought, but only the hours fluttering earthwards from beyond to do the work of Time.
Now at this moment, my gaze chancing to be turned earthwards, I espied a pair of elegant though very dirty boots that strode us-wards, jingling their spurs in oddly familiar manner; therefore I glanced up, beholding in turn white buckskin breeches, flowered waistcoat, bottle-green coat with twinkling silver buttons, the frill of an ample shirt-front and above, the square, dimpled chin, shapely nose and resolute blue eyes of my uncle George who, flourishing off his hat, advanced towards us, his handsome face beaming in cheery welcome.
His men, about to grasp their pieces, saw that one of ours was levelled at the balloon, and that before they could fire, a single shot from us must send them earthwards, to be crushed into one shapeless mass by the fall.
But the promise was fulfilled only in the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdröckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of Lessing produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary turn.
And when he turned his eye earthwards again, still, even there, he had that which made it seem worth the cost of enduring the pangs of living and the brunt of the hardest battle: Paula and her love. The nearer he approached Fostat, the more ardently his heart swelled with longing. Heaven must grant him to see her once more, once more to clasp her in his arms, before the end!
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