Below him, seen through a thin veil of shifting mist, stretched smooth grey downs and a network of roads. Directly beneath, tiny figures moved among the buildings of the wireless station; on the slope of a far hillside rows of conical tents showed white in a passing gleam of sunshine. Something moving along one of the roads held his interest for a moment and the song came to an end; a field-gun battery going out to exercise; horses the size of mice. He wondered what it must be like to be an airman and pepper an enemy battery with a machine-gun. Wouldn't they scatter! Horses all mixed up with the traces, plunging. Pap! pap! pap! would go the machine-gun with the goggled face behind it, laughing triumphant... Fine, it 'ud be.
He bent his head back and stared up into the low-lying clouds that seemed to hover just overhead. Was it because he had been thinking of aeroplanes, or did he really hear the hum of an engine coming down out of the mist? The slender lattice-work above him rose towering for another hundred feet, taking the eye criss-cross along its diminishing perspective until it made you giddy. The sailor knotted his brows and cursed his deafness as he strained to listen. Surely it was an aeroplane. He could feel the vibration of its engine rather than hear it. Or was it the wind droning in the taut wire stays that spread earthward on every side.
Then, swift as a falling stone, flashing dark through the mist, he saw the machine, apparently coming straight for him.
"Look out!" he shouted, and as he spoke the whirring thing crashed fairly into the mast fifty feet above him with a splintering concussion that shook the framework like a whip. The bluejacket ducked his head as a shower of fragments descended, and sat waiting for the thing to fall. Nothing happened. The last piece of shattered propeller dropped clattering down the lattice for a little distance, rebounded and vanished into space. Only the humming of the wind broke a silence that had somehow become dreadful; dreading he knew not what, the man looked up.
There was the plane, with her nose jammed securely between the bars of the crossed lattice, embedded as far as the wings. The fuselage stuck out into the air at right angles to the mast like a dragonfly that had flown blindly against a sticky window... The sight was extraordinary.
The A.B. craned his head downwards. The small figures on the earth were running to and fro like ants. But where was the pilot? He peered up at the motionless wreck and shouted. No reply came. Odd! He'd better go and see about the pilot, who evidently hadn't seen the mast in the fog, and, by the millionth chance, hit it.
Taking with him the rope that secured the boatswain's-stool he commenced to climb. P'raps the bloke was stunned—dead, more likely. Anyhow, he couldn't leave him there in his seat with the likelihood of the machine breaking off from its nose and falling to the earth any moment. Just as well he'd been there at the moment when it happened; that was chance, too, in a way... Rum turn, altogether.
Foot by foot, from cross-bar to girder and girder to cross-bar he climbed, and finally reached the point of impact. The lattice was smashed to matchwood here, and the mast swayed dizzily above the damaged place. Another pull and a heave enabled the rescuer to look down on the unconscious figure who had been the puppet of so incredible a whim of fate. He lay face upwards across one of the wings where he had been flung by the force of the collision. His arms were outstretched, and both legs, from his knees down, hung over the edge of the wing into three hundred and fifty feet of space. The machine had but to sag a couple of feet, or the unconscious figure stir ever so little....
The able seaman took a deep breath. Far below him—perhaps half an hour's climb—men with ropes were toiling upwards to the rescue. Overhead the damaged mast shivered and creaked in the wind; a yard away on the curved surface of the wing lay the pilot, spread-eagled and motionless. "That ain't no place for you!" said the bluejacket. He knotted the rope round his body, made the other end fast to the mast, and gingerly tested the frail platform. Would it stand the weight of both?
Inch by inch he crawled out along the wing, stretched forth a hand, and grabbed the pilot's gauntleted wrist. Then unfastening the rope from his own body he tied it round the insensible figure, and slowly, breathlessly, with many a pause and muttered oath at the tumultuous thumping of his heart—which seemed as if it must bring down the mast—he drew the body off the wing and regained the mast. Sitting in the V-shaped angle of the cross-girders he lashed the boy's shoulders securely to the nearest upright, and with the limp legs across his lap, produced and with difficulty lit the stump of a clay pipe. His hand shook and the perspiration trickled cold behind his ears; but presently his lips parted, and in a not too certain voice he began again his interrupted song: