ocus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplessly
towards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that had
been established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently,
swiftly, and on an immense scale the great discoveries of Hunstedt and
Stossel, and so to give Germany before all other nations a fleet of
airships, the air power and the Empire of the world.

Later, just before they shot him down altogether, Bert saw that great
area of passionate work, warm lit in the evening light, a great area
of upland on which the airships lay like a herd of grazing monsters at
their feed. It was a vast busy space stretching away northward as far as
he could see, methodically cut up into numbered sheds, gasometers, squad
encampments, storage areas, interlaced with the omnipresent mono-rail
lines, and altogether free from overhead wires or cables. Everywhere was
the white, black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black
eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large
vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast
multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue
uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here
and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his
attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on
the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin to manoeuvre
unobserved. They were altogether fish-like. For the great airships with
which Germany attacked New York in her last gigantic effort for
world supremacy--before humanity realized that world supremacy was a
dream--were the lineal descendants of the Zeppelin airship that flew
over Lake Constance in 1906, and of the Lebaudy navigables that made
their memorable excursions over Paris in 1907 and 1908.

These German airships were held together by rib-like skeletons of steel
and aluminium and a stout inelastic canvas outer-skin, within which was
an impervious rubber gas-bag, cut up by transverse dissepiments into
from fifty to a hundred compartments. These were all absolutely gas
tight and filled with hydrogen, and the entire aerostat was kept at any
level by means of a long internal balloonette of oiled and toughened
silk canvas, into which air could be forced and from which it could be
pumped. So the airship could be made either heavier or lighter than air,
and losses of weight through the consumption of fuel, the casti