ne's stomach slipping like a bucket
in a fathomless well--I suppose the intolerable pains in my head spurred
me to the attempt--these and the urgent shortness of my breathing--much
as toothache will drive a man up to the dentist's chair. I knotted the
broken ends of the valve-string and slid back into the car: then tugged
the valve open, while with my disengaged arm I wiped the sweat from my
forehead. It froze upon the coat-cuff.

In a minute or so the drumming in my ears grew less violent. Dalmahoy
bent over the aeronaut, who was bleeding at the nose and now began to
breathe stertorously. Sheepshanks had fallen into placid slumber. I kept
the valve open until we descended into a stratum of fog--from which, no
doubt, the _Lunardi_ had lately risen: the moisture collected here would
account for its congelated coat of silver. By and by, still without
rising, we were quit of the fog, and the moon swept the hollow beneath
us, rescuing solitary scraps and sheets of water and letting them slip
again like imprehensible ghosts. Small fiery eyes opened and shut on us;
cressets of flame on factory chimneys, more and more frequent. I studied
the compass. Our course lay south-by-west. But our whereabouts?
Dalmahoy, being appealed to, suggested Glasgow: and thenceforward I let
him alone. Byfield snored on.

I pulled out my watch, which I had forgotten to wind; and found it run
down. The hands stood at twenty minutes past four. Daylight, then,
could not be far off. Eighteen hours--say twenty: and Byfield had
guessed our rate at one time to be thirty miles an hour. Five hundred
miles----

A line of silver ahead: a ribbon drawn taut across the night,
clean-edged, broadening--the sea! In a minute or two I caught the murmur
of the coast. "Five hundred miles," I began to reckon again, and a holy
calm dawned on me as the _Lunardi_ swept high over the fringing surf,
and its voice faded back with the glimmer of a whitewashed
fishing-haven.

I roused Dalmahoy and pointed. "The sea!"

"Looks like it. Which, I wonder?"

"The English Channel, man."

"I say--are you sure?"

"Eh?" exclaimed Byfield, waking up and coming forward with a stagger.

"The English Channel."

"The French fiddlestick," said he with equal promptness.

"O, have it as you please!" I retorted. It was not worth arguing with
the man.

"What is the hour?"

I told him that my watch had run down. His had done the same. Dalmahoy
did not carry one. We searched the s