The valley of the Ring looked like a black crack in a greenish-gray desert of rock and moss, the landing stage like a tiny bird's nest. The floor of the car moved slightly from side to side. Burke's face had gone gray, and he crouched unsteadily, one hand gripping a steel bracket on the wall.
"My Lord!" he mumbled with dry lips. "My Lord!"
Bennie, momentarily expecting annihilation, crawled on all fours to Burke's side.
The needle of the manometer indicated nine thousand five hundred feet, and was rapidly nearing the next division. Suddenly Burke felt the lever move slowly under his hand as though operated by some outside intelligence, and at the same moment the axis of one gyroscope swung slowly in a horizontal plane through an angle of nearly ninety degrees, while that of the other dipped slightly from the vertical. Both men had a ghastly feeling that the ghost of Pax had somehow returned and assumed control of the car. Bennie rotated the map under the gyroscope until the fine black line on the dial again lay across their destination. Then he crept back to his window again. The earth, far below and dimly visible, was sliding slowly northward, and the dust ring which marked their starting-point now lay as a flattened ellipse on the distant horizon. Beneath and behind them in their flight trailed a thin streak of pale bluish fog—the wake of the Flying Ring.
They were now searing the atmosphere at a height of nearly two miles, and the car was flying on a firm and even keel. There was no sound save the dull roar of the tractor and a slight humming from the vibration of the light steel cables. Bennie no longer felt any disagreeable sensation. A strange detachment possessed him. Dark forests, lakes, and a mighty river appeared to the south—the Moisie—and they followed it as a fishhawk might have done, until the wilderness broke away before them and they saw the broad reach of the St. Lawrence streaked with the smoke of ocean liners.
And then he lost control of himself for the first time and sobbed like a woman—not from fear, nor weariness, nor excitement, but for joy—the joy of the true scientist who has sought the truth and found it, has achieved that for mankind which but for him it would have lacked, perchance, forever. And he looked up at Burke and smiled.
The latter nodded.
"Yes," he remarked prosaically, "this is sure a little bit of all right! All to the good!"