“Oh, there’s very little chance of that. And if there was, the balloonist might find cause to regret the meeting. But come, and I’ll take you round to the captain. He is a better spokesman than I.”
We stepped out on to the passage, and rushing to the bulwark (if I may so call it) I gazed rapturously into the abyss below. It was indeed a glorious sight. The clouds hung around and below us, but here and there through their rents flashed the blue of a waste of rolling waters. Ever and anon these gaps would be speckled with rushing sea-birds, whose cries, mellowed by the distance, broke on the ear like music. Above in the clear blue sky shone the sun at the keystone of his low winter arch, lighting up the cloud masses with a splendour words cannot describe. Far ahead through a break on my right a faint thin streak like distant land seemed visible.
“I can see nothing. Ah, yes! By Jove! who’s on watch? We ought to be rising.”
As he spoke a sudden pitch of the aëronef nearly upset us—the speed rapidly increased, and the wind became positively cutting.
“We are rising fast,” said Burnett. “See, we are leaving the cloud-bank far below us.”
But a new marvel had just caught my eye, and, clinging to the hand-rail, I gazed upwards in astonishment. The wall of the chamber behind us was continuous with the main mass of the aëronef, which, looking from where we stood, exhibited the graceful lines of a ship’s hull. Round this hull and presumably half-way up it ran the railed passage where we were standing, communicating here and there with doorways let into the grey side. Some thirty feet above us this side curved upwards and inwards so as to terminate in a flat, railed deck on which a few moving heads were just visible. But above this again rose a forest of thin grey poles running up to a vast oblong aëroplane which stretched some way beyond the hull. All these props were carefully stayed together, and those towards the bow were somewhat higher than those in the stern; provision being thus made for the inclination of the aëroplane consistently with due maintenance of the hull’s equilibrium below. In the latter part of the nineteenth century much progress had been made in experiments with aëroplanes; those of Maxim being particularly suggestive and interesting. I was, therefore, at no loss to probe the significance of this portion of the mechanism.