than the end of a series of disagreeable
sensations. He was not curious to know what had happened to the airship,
nor what had happened to the battle. For a long time he lay waiting
apprehensively for the pitching and tossing and his qualms to return,
and so, lying, boxed up in the locker, he presently fell asleep.

3

He awoke tranquil but very stuffy, and at the same time very cold, and
quite unable to recollect where he could be. His head ached, and his
breath was suffocated. He had been dreaming confusedly of Edna, and
Desert Dervishes, and of riding bicycles in an extremely perilous manner
through the upper air amidst a pyrotechnic display of crackers and
Bengal lights--to the great annoyance of a sort of composite person made
up of the Prince and Mr. Butteridge. Then for some reason Edna and
he had begun to cry pitifully for each other, and he woke up with wet
eye-lashes into this ill-ventilated darkness of the locker. He would
never see Edna any more, never see Edna any more.

He thought he must be back in the bedroom behind the cycle shop at
the bottom of Bun Hill, and he was sure the vision he had had of the
destruction of a magnificent city, a city quite incredibly great and
splendid, by means of bombs, was no more than a particularly vivid
dream.

"Grubb!" he called, anxious to tell him.

The answering silence, and the dull resonance of the locker to his
voice, supplementing the stifling quality of the air, set going a new
train of ideas. He lifted up his hands and feet, and met an inflexible
resistance. He was in a coffin, he thought! He had been buried alive! He
gave way at once to wild panic. "'Elp!" he screamed. "'Elp!" and drummed
with his feet, and kicked and struggled. "Let me out! Let me out!"

For some seconds he struggled with this intolerable horror, and then
the side of his imagined coffin gave way, and he was flying out into
daylight. Then he was rolling about on what seemed to be a padded floor
with Kurt, and being punched and sworn at lustily.

He sat up. His head bandage had become loose and got over one eye, and
he whipped the whole thing off. Kurt was also sitting up, a yard away
from him, pink as ever, wrapped in blankets, and with an aluminium
diver's helmet over his knee, staring at him with a severe expression,
and rubbing his downy unshaven chin. They were both on a slanting floor
of crimson padding, and above them was an opening like a long, low
cellar flap that Bert by an eff