第 22 页

restoratives were placed, and which also with the seats, served as a

makeweight to the parts of the central engine that projected to the

propeller at the stern.

The engine was very simple in appearance. Asano, pointing out the

parts of this apparatus to him, told him that, like the gas-engine of

Victorian days, it was of the explosive type, burning a small drop of

a substance called "fomile" at each stroke. It consisted simply of

reservoir and piston about the long fluted crank of the propeller shaft.

So much Graham saw of the machine.

The flying stage about him was empty save for Asano and their suite of

attendants. Directed by the aeronaut he placed himself in his seat. He

then drank a mixture containing ergot--a dose, he learnt, invariably

administered to those about to fly, and designed to counteract the

possible effect of diminished air pressure upon the system. Having done

so, he declared himself ready for the journey. Asano took the empty

glass from him, stepped through the bars of the hull, and stood below on

the stage waving his hand. Suddenly he seemed to slide along the stage

to the right and vanish.

The engine was beating, the propeller spinning, and for a second the

stage and the buildings beyond were gliding swiftly and horizontally

past Graham's eye; then these things seemed to tilt up abruptly. He

gripped the little rods on either side of him instinctively. He felt

himself moving upward, heard the air whistle over the top of the

wind screen. The propeller screw moved round with powerful rhythmic

impulses--one, two, three, pause; one, two, three--which the engineer

controlled very delicately. The machine began a quivering vibration that

continued throughout the flight, and the roof areas seemed running away

to starboard very quickly and growing rapidly smaller. He looked from

the face of the engineer through the ribs of the machine. Looking

sideways, there was nothing very startling in what he saw--a rapid

funicular railway might have given the same sensations. He recognised

the Council House and the Highgate Ridge. And then he looked straight

down between his feet.

For a moment physical terror possessed him, a passionate sense of

insecurity. He held tight. For a second or so he could not lift his

eyes. Some hundred feet or more sheer below him was one of the big

windvanes of south-west London, and beyond it the southernmost flying

stage crowded with little black dots. These things seemed to be falling

away from him. For a second he had an impulse to pursue the earth. He

set his teeth, he lifted his eyes by a muscular effort, and the moment

of panic passed.

He remained for a space with his teeth set hard, his eyes staring into

the sky. Throb, throb, throb--beat, went the engine; throb, throb,

throb,--beat. He gripped his bars tightly, glanced at the aeronaut, and

saw a smile upon his sun-tanned face. He smiled in return--perhaps a

little artificially. "A little strange at first," he shouted before he

recalled his dignity. But he dared not look down again for some time.

He stared over the aeronaut's head to where a rim of vague blue horizon

crept up the sky. For a little while he could' not banish the thought

of possible accidents from his mind. Throb, throb, throb--beat; suppose

some trivial screw went wrong in that supporting engine! Suppose--! He

made a grim effort to dismiss all such suppositions. After a while they

did at least abandon the foreground of his thoughts. And up he went

steadily, higher and higher into the clear air.

Once the mental shock of moving unsupported through the air was

over, his sensations ceased to be unpleasant, became very speedily

pleasurable. He had been warned of air sickness. But he found the

pulsating movement of the aeropile as it drove up the faint south-west

breeze was very little in excess of the pitching of a boat head on to

broad rollers in a moderate gale, and he was constitutionally a good

sailor. And the keenness of the more rarefied air into which they

ascended produced a sense of lightness and exhilaration. He looked up

and saw the blue sky above fretted with cirrus clouds. His eye came

cautiously down through the ribs and bars to a shining flight of white

birds that hung in the lower sky. For a space he watched these. Then

going lower and less apprehensively, he saw the slender figure of

the Wind-Vane keeper's crow's nest shining golden in the sunlight and

growing smaller every moment. As his eye fell with more confidence now,

there came a blue line of hills, and then London, already to leeward,

an intricate space of roofing. Its near edge came sharp and clear, and

banished his last apprehensions in a shock of surprise. For the boundary

of London was like a wall, like a cliff, a steep fall of three or four

hundred feet, a frontage broken only by terraces here and there, a

complex decorative facade.

That gradual passage of town into country through an extensive sponge

of suburbs, which was so characteristic a feature of the great cities of

the nineteenth century, existed no longer. Nothing remained of it but

a waste of ruins here, variegated and dense with thickets of the

heterogeneous growths that had once adorned the gardens of the belt,

interspersed among levelled brown patches of sown ground, and verdant

stretches of winter greens. The latter even spread among the vestiges

of houses. But for the most part the reefs and skerries of ruins, the

wreckage of suburban villas, stood among their streets and roads, queer

islands amidst the levelled expanses of green and brown, abandoned

indeed by the inhabitants years since, but too substantial, it seemed',

to be cleared out of the way of the wholesale horticultural mechanisms

of the time.

The vegetation of this waste undulated and frothed amidst the countless

cells of crumbling house walls, and broke along the foot of the city

wall in a surf of bramble and holly and ivy and teazle and tall grasses.

Here and there gaudy pleasure palaces towered amidst the puny remains

of Victorian times, and cable ways slanted to them from the city. That

winter day they seemed deserted. Deserted, too, were the artificial

gardens among the ruins. The city limits were indeed as sharply defined

as in the ancient days when the gates were shut at nightfall and the

robber foreman prowled to the very walls. A huge semi-circular throat

poured out a vigorous traffic upon the Eadhamite Bath Road. So the first

prospect of the world beyond the city flashed on Graham, and dwindled.

And when at last he could look vertically downward again, he saw below

him the vegetable fields of the Thames valley--innumerable minute

oblongs of ruddy brown, intersected by shining threads, the sewage

ditches.

His exhilaration increased rapidly, became a sort of intoxication. He

found himself drawing deep breaths of air, laughing aloud, desiring

to shout. After a time that desire became too strong for him, and he

shouted.

The machine had now risen as high as was customary with aeropiles, and

they began to curve about towards the south. Steering, Graham perceived,

was effected by the opening or closing of one or two thin strips of

membrane in one or other of the otherwise rigid wings, and by the

movement of the whole engine backward or forward along its supports. The

aeronaut set the engine gliding slowly forward along its rail and

opened the valve of the leeward wing until the stem of the aeropile was

horizontal and pointing southward. And in that direction they drove with

a slight list to leeward, and with a slow alternation of movement, first

a short, sharp ascent and' then a long downward glide that was very

swift and pleasing. During these downward glides the propellor was

inactive altogether. These ascents gave Graham a glorious sense of

successful effort; the descents through the rarefied air were beyond all

experience. He wanted never to leave the upper air again.

For a time he was intent upon the minute details of the landscape that

ran swiftly northward beneath him. Its minute, clear detail pleased him

exceedingly. He was impressed by the ruin of the houses that had once

dotted the country, by the vast treeless expanse of country from which

all farms and villages had gone, save for crumbling ruins. He had known

the thing was so, but seeing it so was an altogether different matter.

He tried to make out places he had known within the hollow basin of

the world below, but at first he could distinguish no data now that the

Thames valley was left behind. Soon, however, they were driving over a

sharp chalk hill that he recognised as the Guildford Hog's Back, because

of the familiar outline of the gorge at its eastward end, and because of

the ruins of the town that rose steeply on either lip of this gorge.

And from that he made out other points, Leith Hill, the sandy wastes

of Aldershot, and so forth. The Downs escarpment was set with gigantic

slow-moving wind-wheels. Save where the broad Eadhamite Portsmouth

Road, thickly dotted with rushing shapes, followed the course of the old

railway, the gorge of the Wey was choked with thickets.

The whole expanse of the Downs escarpment, so far as the grey haze

permitted him to see, was set with wind-wheels to which the largest of

the city was but a younger brother. They stirred with a stately motion

before the south-west wind. And here and there were patches dotted

with the sheep of the British Food Trust, and here and there a mounted

shepherd made a spot of black. Then rushing under the stern of the

aeropile came the Wealden Heights, the line of Hindhead, Pitch Hill, and

Leith Hill, with a second row of wind-wheels that seemed striving to rob

the downland whirlers of their share of breeze. The purple heather was

speckled with yellow gorse, and on the further side a drove of black

oxen stampeded before a couple of mounted men. Swiftly these swept

behind, and dwindled and lost colour, and became scarce moving specks

that were swallowed up in haze.

And when these had vanished in the distance Graham heard a peewit

wailing close at hand. He perceived he was now above the South Downs,

and staring over his shoulder saw the battlements of Portsmouth Landing

Stage towering over the ridge of Portsdown Hill. In another moment there

came into sight a spread of shipping like floating cities, the little

white cliffs of the Needles dwarfed and sunlit, and the grey and

glittering waters of the narrow sea. They seemed to leap the Solent in

a moment, and in a few seconds the Isle of Wight was running past, and

then beneath him spread a wider and wide extent of sea, here purple with

the shadow of a cloud, here grey, here a burnished mirror, and here

a spread of cloudy greenish blue. The Isle of Wight grew smaller and

smaller. In a few more minutes a strip of grey haze detached itself from

other strips that were clouds, descended out of the sky and became a

coastline--sunlit and pleasant--the coast of northern France. It rose,

it took colour, became definite and detailed, and the counterpart of the

Downland of England was speeding by below.

In a little time, as it seemed, Paris came above the horizon, and hung

there for a space, and sank out of sight again as the aeropile circled

about to the north again. But he perceived the Eiffel Tower still

standing, and beside it a huge dome surmounted by a pinpoint Colossus.

And he perceived, too, though he did not understand it at the time, a

slanting drift of smoke. The aeronaut said something about "trouble in

the underways," that Graham did not heed at the time. But he marked the

minarets and towers and slender masses that streamed skyward above the

city windvanes, and knew that in the matter of grace at least Paris

still kept in front of her larger rival. And even as he looked a pale

blue shape ascended very swiftly from the city like a dead leaf driving

up before a gale. It curved round and soared towards them growing

rapidly larger and larger. The aeronaut was saying something. "What?"

said Graham, loath to take his eyes from this. "Aeroplane, Sire," bawled

the aeronaut pointing.

They rose and curved about northward as it drew nearer. Nearer it came

and nearer, larger and larger. The throb, throb, throb--beat, of the

aeropile's flight, that had seemed so potent and so swift, suddenly

appeared slow by comparison with this tremendous rush. How great the

monster seemed, how swift and steady! It passed quite closely beneath

them, driving along silently, a vast spread of wirenetted translucent

wings, a thing alive. Graham had a momentary glimpse of the rows and

rows of wrapped-up passengers, slung in their little cradles behind

wind-screens, of a white-clothed engineer crawling against the gale

along a ladder way, of spouting engines beating together, of the

whirling wind screw, and of a wide waste of wing. He exulted in the

sight. And in an instant the thing had passed.

It rose slightly and their own little wings swayed in the rush of its

flight. It fell and grew smaller. Scarcely had they moved, as it seemed,

before it was again only a flat blue thing that dwindled in the sky.

This was the aeroplane that went to and fro between London and Paris. In

fair weather and in peaceful times it came and went four times a day.

They beat across the Channel, slowly as it seemed now, to Graham's

enlarged ideas, and Beachy Head rose greyly to the left of them.

"Land," called the aeronaut, his voice small against the whistling of

the air over the wind-screen.

"Not yet," bawled Graham, laughing. "Not land yet. I want to learn more

of this machine."

"I meant--" said the aeronaut.

"I want to learn more of this machine," repeated Graham.

"I'm coming to you," he said, and had flung himself free of his chair

and taken a step along the guarded rail between them. He stopped for a

moment, and his colour changed and his hands tightened. Another step and

he was clinging close to the aeronaut. He felt a weight on his shoulder,

the pressure of the air. His hat was a whirling speck behind. The wind