CHAPTER XX.
THROUGH THE CENTURIES As they discovered that the sea journey to Copenhagen would be somewhat tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly palatial, Nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to Ostend, spend a day there and go on to Cologne, put in a couple of days more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at Hamburg, so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as Nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village of the Ubii and the Roman colony of Agrippina into the Hanse Town of the thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty Dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last tower in 1880.
During the journey from Hamburg to Copenhagen, Nitocris, reclining comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them not only extraordinary, but also very curious.

She had already learnt that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the border had been passed, was Will: but Will of a far more intense and exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to action on the lower plane.

There was naturally something that seemed extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like "the airy fabric of a vision," and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages, or the future from the womb of unborn things.
But to her, at least at first, the strangest part of the new revelation was this: When her will had carried her across the confines of the tri-dimensional world, and she saw the centuries marshalled and motionless before her, she felt not the slightest sense of wonder or awe.

She was simply a being apart, moving along their ranks and passing them in review, herself unseen and unknown save by that other being who, in this state, was no longer her father or even her friend, but merely a companion endowed with power and intelligence equal to her own.

Her human hopes and fears and loves and passions had, as it were, been left behind.