To the right a dark hill loomed without warning, with a dim congeries of red tea-houses. It was the famous Ikegami, the shrine of the Buddhist saint Ichiren, famed for its plum-gardens. It fell away behind, and now, far off, a score of miles ahead, grew up on the horizon a misty blotch of radiance. Yokohama! He swerved, heading out across the lagoon, straight as the bee flies for the shimmering spot. Pst-pst--pst-pst--faster and faster spat the tiny explosions. The Glider throbbed and sang like a thing alive, and the hum of the propeller shrilled into a scream.
Tokyo was far behind now, the pale glow ahead rising and spreading. To the right he could see the clumped lights of the villages along the railroad, Kamata--Kawasaki--Tsurumi. He dropped still lower, out of the lash of the wind.
Suddenly a flying missile struck the forward plane, which resounded like a great drum. A drop of something red fell on his bare hand and a feathered body fell like a stone between his feet. A dark carpet, dotted with foam, seemed to spring up out of the gulf. Daunt threw himself at the levers and rammed them back. The Glider had almost touched the sea--for a heartbreaking instant he thought it could never rise. He heard the curl of the waves, and a cry from behind him. Then, slowly, slowly, breasting the blast, it came staggering up the hill of air to safety.
The sky was perceptibly lightening now. Daunt realized it with a tightening of all his muscles. It was the first tentative withdrawal of the forces of the dark. Should he be in time? With his free hand he loosened the coil of the grapnel. Suddenly the chances seemed all against success. A feeling of hopelessness caught him. He thought of the two men he had left behind, waiting--waiting. What message would come to them that morning?
The engine was doing its best, every fiber of tested steel and canvas ringing and throbbing. But the creeping pallor of the night grew apace. Kanagawa:--the Glider swooped above it, left it behind. The misty glow was all around now, lights pricked up through the shadow. Yokohama was under his feet, and ahead--the darker mass toward which he was hurtling--was the Bluff.
Slowly, with painful anxiety, he swung the huge float in to skirt the cliff's seaward edge. There was the naval hospital with its flag-staff. There beyond, was the familiar break in the rampart of foliage--and there, flapping in the wind, was the awning on the flat roof of the Roost. In the dawning twilight, it seemed a monstrous, leprous lichen, shuddering at the unholy thing it hid. Daunt threw out the grapnel.