It is said that Earth-Air is at once the sweetest and the most addictive scent there is. That is why Earth has been declared offlimits to all our Fair Captains. We have lost too many of them — one scent of it and they abandon everything for the mindless comforts below.
Those who are addicted to Earth-Air often stroll. To stroll is to travel aimlessly — for “pleasure” as they put it. It doesn’t matter to the Earth-Air addict — just a change of scenery is enough. For yes, most of the time the Earth-Air addicts just sit around staring. Just staring and breathing and sighing, examining with intense and seemingly durable curiosity such “fabulous” items as sand, stone, grass, or wave.
To be an Earth-Air addict is to abandon the star-search. It is to willfully glut the senses — to bathe incessantly in emanations. Just to go on breathing is enough — just to go on strolling. What a waste of life it is to become just a bag, a bellows for this detestable Earth-Air. Yet whenever our Fair Captains are missing we always find them standing on mountain peaks, breathing in Earth-Air. The wind blows and they are insane. They never want to leave. They want to run down into the valleys and breathe. They want to breathe all the different scents of Earth-Air there are. The famed Captain Zenon, for instance, was finally found perched over something called a “Daffodil,” his mind gone, his nostrils flared. Captain Arbox was located in Ambergris just rolling and rolling, raving about the “aroma,” taking great gusts of it deep into his lungs and then expelling it with long “musical” sighs that were terrible to hear.