The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing would!
He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord and Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne was grateful. They understood, and—people—would not.
He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon the left.
He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.
The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted something. Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his head vigorously, and then—one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for nothing!—released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest, and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the fuselage:
"I—can't—hear!"
The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant, nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:
"Have you the brown satchel?"
Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his head and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him, buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat. He nodded assent, and signalled:
"All right!"
"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:
"Where are we? When shall we go down?"
Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping half-circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question, bidding him look and see.
The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew. Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel.
Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's eyes downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever how good it is to be alive.
Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown, grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.
He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.
"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand and signalled in answer:
"One hour!"
"When do we go home?"
"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in his seat to wait.
Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.
"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that meant—that could only mean the Sea.
He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down below.
Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aëroplane in deluges of invisible spray.
On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots, where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of the boy in the aëroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.
Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.
Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany—or the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—with more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's naval affairs.
Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you—together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.
The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed, sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was ravenous.
From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving headland with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the tall granite towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron, rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each shaft to a railed stone platform well above high-water mark. And a shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting through what was presumably a megaphone. In reality the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the yard-arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this warning was lost upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a great upleaping billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a withered leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye does—and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and south. In the same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea, the very Sea.