There is a large crowd on the neatly trimmed grass that runs up the hill away from the lake. A deep blue sky frames the snow capped mountain on the opposite shore. With its omniscient wide clear eye it overwhelms all others but the water, which glaring back in blacker hue does not flinch in its reflecting gaze, but even so must eternally surrender as the lesser god before the greater. A light wind kicks up tiny traces of white on the lower surface. Here on the land, trapped between those cyclopean stares, cypress and spruce are mannered beside gravel paths. The garden is formal and subdued. It can not be otherwise. The air is dark, though noon is hardly gone and the sun above the mountain not yet concealed by the shadow it will throw this way. It feels as though the eye has returned from too long reading white paper under the summer, to find everything shocked into shrouded retreat. But it has not. Even the white villa, vaguely classical in a late European way, is by no means bright enough to succeed in shattering the alien veil.

Look at the people. They walk slowly and sedately down the paths and across the sloping lawns, talking quietly to one another. Listening to the voices is disconcerting as the language is half familiar and yet cannot be understood. In tone it is reminiscent of French but only a few of the words are the same. This is high society. The men are dressed in velvet black dinner suits, the women in full skirts supported by bustles and fastened at the waist with silken bows in oranges, blues and reds. Waiters pass between the guests with silver trays of glasses which occasionally catch the sun to flash a dark sparkle in the air. The effect is like that of an Edwardian party but the costumes are closer to the Victorian, except for the bows of the ladies. The bows are Japanese.

An ornamental fountain feeds a small stream, bounded by dark mossy masonry for the length of the garden until it escapes the stone to flow into the quiet depths of the lake waters. This artifice is repeated at the other end of the villa, but between the two cool unnatural springs and the sweeping steps at the front of the house, there is a section of flat land. It is here that the party is focused. Billowing like some giant puffball up above the building, an enormous white, hot air balloon bubbles gently full before a score of onlookers. A wicker work basket beneath is supported by thin but strong ropes, and the whole tied to the ground with loops of a heavier twine round metal spikes in the pristine turf. In the basket is a young man with a dark handlebar moustache, dressed in red military uniform. He is accompanied by a blonde woman, trim and small in her early twenties and an older white haired man in a sober black coat. The major and Lady Rosalind are being chaperoned by the doctor.

And now they are away! The ropes fall behind and up into the sky, up and away into that eye, the white moat floats! Polite claps flock below them like thin birds, too weak to follow in the breeze.

Rosalind in unhappy. She does not like the major. He is awkward but impatient. The front with the royals and the infidels did not present the problems he finds now.

The doctor notices nothing. He takes in deep breaths and as they rise the air becomes clearer; crystalline and bright. A long time sharpness in his chest is wonderfully asleep. Today it seems to him that anything might happen. The lungs of the occupants are heady with oxygen wine, the stronger for its rarity. At any moment it can happen.

Watch them drift across the lake. The burning gas keeping them so high already sounds muted to the party goers as they vanish into their new element. Soon they will pass over the near shoulder of the mountain to glide above the plain. How the peasants will cheer ! All the villages and the farms of the fertile west will be spread out below them. Almost out of sight of the few observers they are a tiny dot. It is a long way to the mountain. At last, though, they can see the first of the harvest lands: like a tapestry, Rosalind thinks: like a coloured map for a campaign, the major thinks. But today he has a different sort of campaign in mind. He puts a bold arm around Rosalind’s tiny shoulders. She shakes a little without volition but it is not from the cold. The doctor notices nothing.

It happens.

The sound of a misplaced word has done it, but no one can remember who spoke. It has fractured the air along a fault line like the first blow of a jeweller on a new and large rough diamond. A strange rhythm shakes the world and cracks the sky. With an eyeblink flash it flickers from dead blue to azure. Perhaps even its mighty gaze before was through some translucent membrane; through a half closed lid. If that was so it is opening up now - waking up to a new day. How terrible that is! Below them the land has vanished and there is a thundering sea with islands bathed in a warm wind! The tang of salt is unmistakably strong and there are hints of other aromas.

See, saw; they are back. Rosalind shakes the major’s grip as they reel into the colder world. Sea, saw. Don’t look over the basket. The trespassing ocean is back again! The doctor is exhilarated. The major feels sick, although the only source of motion is the usual hiss and creak of the balloon. There is the rhythm, and there is the dark blue where the land fades back into reality.

Sky saw, and the whole universe has changed. The heavy air is redolent of powerful seas. Sky saw.

Can it be seen? From the distant villa some people think the balloon is flickering in and out of vision. Of course they are deluded. They have had too much of that strange spirit which the waiters are supplying.

Sky saw.

The crack has healed. How pale the sky is! Was there ever such a turquoise? The balloon drifts on in a tropical warmth and the doctor, the major and the lady wonder.