Jonathan Swift visits Laputa’s works in progress.
After having seen all the curiosities of the island of Laputa, I was very desirous to leave it, being heartily weary of those people. They were indeed excellent in two sciences, mathematics and music, for which I have great esteem and wherein I am not unversed, but at the same time so abstracted and involved in speculation that I never met with such disagreeable companions.
On the sixteenth day of February, I took leave of his majesty and the court. The king made me a present to the value of about two hundred pounds English, together with a letter of recommendation to a friend of his in Lagado, the metropolis. The island being then hovering over a mountain about two miles from it, I was let down from the lowest gallery in the same manner as I had been taken up.