Touched by my wife’s distress, I would have sprung downward to reassure her, but I found myself incapable of motion. “Trouble not yourself about your wife,” said my guide: “she will not be long left in anxiety; meantime, let us take a survey of Flatland.”

Once more I felt myself rising through space. It was even as the Sphere had said. The further we receded from the object we beheld, the larger became the field of vision. My native city, with the interior of every house and every creature therein, lay open to my view in miniature. We mounted higher, and lo, the secrets of the earth, the depths of mines and inmost caverns of the hills, were bared before me.