Dr. Birdlip’s dirigible arrives at Hampstead Heath amid a mass gathering already primed to read the night as an omen. Its landing beside Langdon St. Ives’s spacecraft redirects the crowd and brings the fourth and final Keeble box into a scene where scientific marvel, religious spectacle, and the return of the dead collide.

The spectacle before the landing

The Heath is crowded with Londoners whose shouting, singing, and drunkenness have frustrated Parsons, a member of the assembled Royal Academy. He regards the crowd’s presence as the consequence of an evangelist’s apocalyptic tracts, which have stirred a million Londoners into an exodus. The gathering is therefore not simply an audience for the scientists: it has formed around a competing explanation of the extraordinary events unfolding there.

The evangelist stands with a foot on each of two kneeling parishioners and raises a cube for the crowd to see. Darkness and scattered fires make its nature difficult to discern. Under the starry sky, the evangelist’s exhortations draw an answering shout, then a scream: people point upward as a small light arcs down from the sky and brightens. He names the falling star Wormwood. The moment briefly seems to confirm the apocalyptic drama he has been preaching, while the crowd’s attention moves from the object in his hands to the heavens.

The dirigible reaches the Heath

That expectation is interrupted by a sudden outcry from the direction of Hampstead village. Dr. Birdlip’s blimp emerges from the starry distance, swings slowly on the breeze, and makes for the Heath. The account sets this arrival against the glowing spheroid ship that has already fallen from the sky: the dirigible is another astonishing craft, but its approach changes the immediate direction of the spectacle. St. Ives’s arrival had seemed wonderful; the approaching blimp now draws the Royal Academy away from him.

The crowd rushes uphill after the airship. When it settles onto the green, it comes to rest less than twenty-five feet from St. Ives’s space vehicle. The abrupt shift leaves St. Ives behind, facing the chair tethered to his craft rather than the scientists who had gathered around him. The Academy, led by Parsons, clusters instead around the chair and its skeletal occupant, eager to examine the figure described as a sailor returned from the sea. The scene places two extraordinary arrivals side by side, but the mass of spectators makes the dirigible—and what it carries—the new center of attention.

The box and the stakes of arrival

The blimp’s significance is more than spectacle. St. Ives understands it to be carrying the inheritance of Jack Owlesby: independence for Jack and Dorothy, the only respectable legacy left by Sebastian Owlesby. The airship’s arrival therefore brings a material stake into the open amid the public commotion. The box aboard it is the fourth and final one, and the people converging on the landing are not all drawn by scientific curiosity. St. Ives fears that Kelso Drake will try to repossess the spacecraft, Willis Pule will destroy it, and Shiloh will claim it as a divine chariot. He faces a choice between guarding his own craft and preventing the crowd from overwhelming the blimp and taking the jewel.

The scramble that follows makes those competing interests visible. Bill Kraken sees Theophilus Godall carrying the Marseilles Pinkle, then runs into Drake and knocks him down, taking the Keeble box from his hands. As the crowd surges toward the landed dirigible, Captain Powers, William Keeble, and Dorothy Keeble are among those pressing toward the box aboard it. Kraken is swept off his feet and nearly trampled, ending up on the ground atop the box he has just seized; Drake falls upon him. The landing thus turns an arrival into a crush of bodies, contested objects, and interrupted plans.

The corpse’s movement

The crowd’s attention shifts once more when the corpse in the chair stirs. It straightens its back, clenches its fists, draws air through closed teeth, and stands, pulling loose the ropes tangled in the chair’s springs. It holds the Keeble box aloft. St. Ives identifies the figure as the Homunculus, while Godall stands beside him with St. Ives’s aerator in one hand and the captured Pule in the other. The witnesses are left watching this silent display on the Heath.

The arrival’s consequences are therefore deliberately double. Dr. Birdlip’s dirigible brings the final box and the promise of an inheritance, but its landing also gathers the people and rival claims that make possession uncertain. Meanwhile, the spectacle surrounding the blimp gives way to a different revelation: the body treated as a bound, inert exhibit has stood up and taken the box. The vehicles, the crowd, and the objects passing between hands turn the Heath into a public stage where neither religious prophecy nor scientific authority can control what the witnesses see.