can't explain'"

He discovered, later, traces of an attempt to cross the gap in the
broken bridge. A rope with a bolt attached had been flung across and had
caught in a fenestration of a projecting fragment of railing. The end of
the rope trailed in the seething water towards the fall.

But the bird-faced officer was already rubbing shoulders with certain
inert matter that had once been Lieutenant Kurt and the Chinese aeronaut
and a dead cow, and much other uncongenial company, in the huge circle
of the Whirlpool two and a quarter miles away. Never had that great
gathering place, that incessant, aimless, unprogressive hurry of
waste and battered things, been so crowded with strange and melancholy
derelicts. Round they went and round, and every day brought its
new contributions, luckless brutes, shattered fragments of boat and
flying-machine, endless citizens from the cities upon the shores of the
great lakes above. Much came from Cleveland. It all gathered here, and
whirled about indefinitely, and over it all gathered daily a greater
abundance of birds.

CHAPTER X. THE WORLD UNDER THE WAR

1

Bert spent two more days upon Goat Island, and finished all his
provisions except the cigarettes and mineral water, before he brought
himself to try the Asiatic flying-machine.

Even at last he did not so much go off upon it as get carried off. It
had taken only an hour or so to substitute wing stays from the second
flying-machine and to replace the nuts he had himself removed. The
engine was in working order, and differed only very simply and obviously
from that of a contemporary motor-bicycle. The rest of the time was
taken up by a vast musing and delaying and hesitation. Chiefly he saw
himself splashing into the rapids and whirling down them to the Fall,
clutching and drowning, but also he had a vision of being hopelessly in
the air, going fast and unable to ground. His mind was too concentrated
upon the business of flying for him to think very much of what might
happen to an indefinite-spirited Cockney without credential who arrived
on an Asiatic flying-machine amidst the war-infuriated population
beyond.

He still had a lingering solicitude for the bird-faced officer. He had
a haunting fancy he might be lying disabled or badly smashed in some
way in some nook or cranny of the Island; and it was only after a most
exhaustive search that he abandoned that distressing idea. "If I found
'im," he reasoned the while, "wh