something like a barrel or a
huge football.

CRASH! It smashed with an immense report. It had fallen among the
grounded Asiatic aeroplanes that lay among the turf and flower-beds near
the river. They flew in scraps and fragments, turf, trees, and gravel
leapt and fell; the aeronauts still lying along the canal bank were
thrown about like sacks, catspaws flew across the foaming water. All the
windows of the hotel hospital that had been shiningly reflecting blue
sky and airships the moment before became vast black stars. Bang!--a
second followed. Bert looked up and was filled with a sense of a number
of monstrous bodies swooping down, coming down on the whole affair like
a flight of bellying blankets, like a string of vast dish-covers. The
central tangle of the battle above was circling down as if to come
into touch with the power-house fight. He got a new effect of airships
altogether, as vast things coming down upon him, growing swiftly larger
and larger and more overwhelming, until the houses over the way seemed
small, the American rapids narrow, the bridge flimsy, the combatants
infinitesimal. As they came down they became audible as a complex of
shootings and vast creakings and groanings and beatings and throbbings
and shouts and shots. The fore-shortened black eagles at the fore-ends
of the Germans had an effect of actual combat of flying feathers.

Some of these fighting airships came within five hundred feet of the
ground. Bert could see men on the lower galleries of the Germans,
firing rifles; could see Asiatics clinging to the ropes; saw one man
in aluminium diver's gear fall flashing headlong into the waters above
Goat Island. For the first time he saw the Asiatic airships closely.
From this aspect they reminded him more than anything else of colossal
snowshoes; they had a curious patterning in black and white, in forms
that reminded him of the engine-turned cover of a watch. They had no
hanging galleries, but from little openings on the middle line peeped
out men and the muzzles of guns. So, driving in long, descending and
ascending curves, these monsters wrestled and fought. It was like clouds
fighting, like puddings trying to assassinate each other. They whirled
and circled about each other, and for a time threw Goat Island and
Niagara into a smoky twilight, through which the sunlight smote in
shafts and beams. They spread and closed and spread and grappled and
drove round over the rapids, and two miles awa